Extracting Joint Weak Values with Local, Single-Particle Measurements

Weak measurement is a new technique which allows one to describe the evolution of postselected quantum systems. It appears to be useful for resolving a variety of thorny quantum paradoxes, particularly when used to study properties of pairs of particles. Unfortunately, such nonlocal or joint observables often prove difficult to measure directly in practice (for instance, in optics—a common testing ground for this technique—strong photon-photon interactions would be needed to implement an appropriate von Neumann interaction). Here we derive a general, experimentally feasible, method for extracting these joint weak values from correlations between single-particle observables.