By merging two or more sources of light, interferometers create interference patterns that can provide remarkably detailed information about everything they illuminate, from a tiny flaw on a mirror, to the dispersion of pollutants in the atmosphere, to gravitational patterns in far reaches of the Universe.
"If you want to measure something with very high precision, you almost always use an optical interferometer, because light makes for a very precise ruler," says Jaime Cardenas, assistant professor of optics at the University of Rochester.
Now, the Cardenas Lab has created a way to make these optical workhorses even more useful and sensitive. Meiting Song, a Ph.D. student, has for the first time packaged an experimental way of amplifying interferometric signals—without a corresponding increase in extraneous, unwanted input, or "noise"—on a 1 mm by 1 mm integrated photonic chip. The breakthrough, described in Nature Communications, is based on a theory of weak value amplification with waveguides that was developed by Andrew Jordan, a professor of physics at Rochester, and students in his lab.
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