Ultra-sensitive measurement of transverse displacements with structured light

Abstract

Accurately measuring mechanical displacements is essential for a vast portion of current technologies. Several optical techniques accomplish this task, allowing for non-contact sensing even below the diffraction limit. Here we introduce an optical encoding technique, dubbed "linear photonic gears", that enables ultra-sensitive measurements of transverse displacements by mapping these into polarization rotations of a laser beam. In ordinary ambient conditions, we measure the relative shift between two objects with a resolution of 400 pm. We argue that a resolution of 50 pm should be achievable with existing state-of-the-art technologies. Our single-optical-path scheme is intrinsically stable and it could be implemented as a compact sensor, using integrated optics. We anticipate it may have a strong impact on both research and industry.

References in corpus (4)

• Electromagnetic Angular Momentum
• Electromagnetic Force and Momentum
• Ultrasensitive force and displacement detection using trapped ions
• A nanoelectromechanical position-sensitive detector with picometer resolution

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Full spatial characterization of entangled structured photons
• Electrically tunable liquid-crystal metasurfaces with patterned birefringence and dichroism
• Ultrasensitive Measurement of Angular Rotations via Hermite-Gaussian Pointer
• Schmidt modes carrying orbital angular momentum generated by cascaded systems pumped with Laguerre-Gaussian beams