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A quantum-nondemolition (QND) measurement is one which does not disturb the quantity it measures. Any measurement can be regarded as a QND measurement followed by an additional back-action which may disturb that quantity. By feeding back the measurement result to control the system dynamics, this back-action can always be eliminated in principle. A practical device based on homodyne measurement of the x quadrature of a cavity mode is investigated. First, a ^ (2) crystal is inserted in the cavity so that it becomes a degenerate parametric oscillator at threshold. Then the photocurrent is used to control coherent driving of the cavity, so as to give positive feedback with unit gain. This feedback, combined with the nonlinearity, turns the homodyne measurement into a QND measurement of x. The device can also be used to measure the x quadrature of a traveling wave, and gives near-perfect QND correlations over a large bandwidth. However, the quality of the measurement is badly degraded by even slightly inefficient photodetectors.
Howard M. Wiseman (Wed,) studied this question.