How a single photon can induce 100-photon-worth of radiation pressure
Published:
I have recently got a chance to read this seminal paper by Yakir Aharonov et al., where a major surprise of the work is that, for a certain construction of the spin measurement of spin-1/2 particles, the apparent readout of the spin of a single particle can be arbitrarily larger than 1/2 (e.g., 100). While their main results are provided in a generic language, the thought experiment considered in the paper is a somewhat involved Stern-Gerlach experiment using electrons, which I struggled to digest as a one from nonlinear optics. The aim of this post is to show a simple nonlinear-optical reformulation of their thought experiment, hopefully providing useful intuitions to those with quantum and/or nonlinear optics background. Specifically, we construct a concrete example where single-photon can induce 100-photon-worth of radiation pressure.