title: Weak value amplified optical activity measurements.
abstract: We present a new form of optical activity measurement based on a modified weak value amplification scheme. It has recently been shown experimentally that the left- and right-circular polarization components refract with slightly different angles of refraction at a chiral interface causing a linearly polarized light beam to split into two. By introducing a polarization modulation that does not give rise to a change in the optical rotation it is possible to differentiate between the two circular polarization components even after post-selection with a linear polarizer. We show that such a modified weak value amplification measurement permits the sign of the splitting and thus the handedness of the optically active medium to be determined. Angular beam separations of Δθ ∼ 1 nanoradian, which corresponds to a circular birefringence of Δn ∼ 1 × 10(-9), could be measured with a relative error of less than 1%.
authors.affiliation: Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques, 79110 Freiburg,Germany. marcel.pfeifer@ipm.fraunhofer.de
authors.forename: Marcel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pfeifer
authors.forename: Peer
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Fischer