Optimal Probe Wavefunction of Weak-Value Amplification

Abstract: The weak measurement proposed by Aharonov and his colleagues extracts information of a physical quantity of the system by the post selection as the shifts of the argument of the probe wavefunction. The shift is called the weak value and is larger for the post-selected state more orthogonal to the initial state. Recently, the signal amplification by the weak measurement has been extensively studied. In the present work, we explicitly obtain the optimal probe wavefunction and the amplification factor for a given weak value, which is calculated from the experimental setup. It is shown that the amplification factor has no upper bound in contrast to the Gaussian probe wavefunction and that the amplified signal is sharp.