Quantum nondemolition measurements - Comment on recent developments

Abstract

The limitations of the detectability of extremely weak signals (gravitational radiation for instance) imposed by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle on the sequential determination of those signals have been explored recently. A variety of schemes have been proposed to circumvent these limitations. Although all of the earlier attempts have been proven fruitless a recent proposal seems to be quite promising. The scheme, consisting of two harmonic oscillators interacting with each other in a peculiar way, allows for an exact analytical solution which is derived here. If it can be assumed that the expectation value of one of the canonical variables of the total system suffices to monitor the weak signal it can be shown that, in the absence of thermal noise, arbitrarily weak signals can in principle be measured without interference from the uncertainty principle.