Ultrasensitive Measurement of Angular Rotations via Hermite-Gaussian Pointer

Abstract

Exploring high sensitivity on the measurement of angular rotations is an outstanding challenge in optics and metrology. In this work, we employ the mn-order Hermite-Gaussian beam in the weak measurement scheme with an angular rotation interaction, where the rotation information is taken by another HG mode state completely after the post-selection. By taking a projective measurement on the final light beam, the precision of angular rotation is improved by a factor of 2mn+m+n. For verification, we perform an optical experiment where the minimum detectable angular rotation improves $\sqrt{15}$-fold with HG55 mode over that of HG11 mode, and achieves a sub-microradian scale of the measurement precision. Our theoretical framework and experimental results not only provide a more practical and convenient scheme for ultrasensitive measurement of angular rotations, but also contribute to a wide range of applications in quantum metrology.