Improving the precision of optical metrology by detecting fewer photons with biased weak measurement

In optical metrological protocols to measure physical quantities,it is,in principle,always beneficial to in crease photon number n to improve measurement precision.However,practical constraints prevent the arbitrary increase of n due to the imperfections of a practical detector,especially when the detector response is dominated by the saturation effect.In this work,we show that a modified weak measurement protocol,namely,biased weak measurement significantly improves the precision of optical metrology in the presence of saturation effect.This method detects an ultra-small fraction of photons while main tains a considerable amount of metrological information.The biased pre-coupling leads to an additi onal reduction of photons in the post-selection and gene rates an extinction point in the spectrum distribution,which is extremely sensitive to the estimated parameter and difficult to be saturated.Therefore,the Fisher information can be persistently enhanced by increasing the photon number.In our magnetic-sensing experiment,biased weak measurement achieves precision approximately one order of magnitude better than those of previously used methods.The proposed method can be applied in various optical measurement schemes to remarkably mitigate the detector saturation effect with low-cost apparatuses.