Abstract

Postselection strategies have been proposed with the aim of amplifying weak signals, which may help to overcome detection thresholds associated with technical noise in high-precision measurements. Here we use an optical setup to experimentally explore two different postselection protocols for the estimation of a small parameter: a weak-value amplification procedure and an alternative method that does not provide amplification but nonetheless is shown to be more robust for the sake of parameter estimation. Each technique leads approximately to the saturation of quantum limits for the estimation precision, expressed by the Cramer-Rao bound. For both situations, we show that parameter estimation is improved when the postselection statistics are considered together with the measurement device.