Continuous phase amplification with a Sagnac interferometer

Abstract

We describe a weak value inspired phase amplification technique in a Sagnac interferometer. We monitor the relative phase between two paths of a slightly misaligned interferometer by measuring the average position of a split-Gaussian mode in the dark port. Although we monitor only the dark port, we show that the signal varies linearly with phase and that we can obtain similar sensitivity to balanced homodyne detection. We derive the source of the amplification both with classical wave optics and as an inverse weak value.