Abstract
We study the problem of estimating the phase shift due to the general relativistic time dilation in the interference of photons using a nonlinear Mach-Zender interferometer setup. By introducing two nonlinear Kerr materials, one in the bottom and one in the top arm, we can measure the nonlinear phase produced by the space-time curvature and achieve a scaling of the standard deviation with photon number () of where , which exceeds the conventional Heisenberg limit of a linear interferometer (). The nonlinear phase shift is an effect that is amplified by the intensity of the probe field. In a regime of high photon number, this effect can dominate over the linear phase shift.
- Received 12 January 2017
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.96.041801
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