Seeing opportunity in every difficulty: protecting information with weak value techniques

Abstract: A weak value is an effective description of the influence of a pre and post-selected 'principal' system on another 'meter' system to which it is weakly coupled. Weak values can describe anomalously large deflections of the meter, and deflections in otherwise unperturbed variables: this motivates investigation of the potential benefits of the protocol in precision metrology. We present a visual interpretation of weak value experiments in phase space, enabling an evaluation of the effects of three types of detector noise as 'Fisher information efficiency' functions. These functions depend on the marginal distribution of the Wigner function of the meter, and give a unified view of the weak value protocol as a way of protecting Fisher information from detector imperfections. This approach explains why weak value techniques are more effective for avoiding detector saturation than for mitigating detector jitter or pixelation.