A hybrid microwave-optical interferometer for off-resonance two-photon detection

Abstract We propose a new method for identifying if two molecules interact to form a compound molecule. It relies on exciting the sample with two different laser frequencies and measuring the relative phase change of the transmitted light. In this method, the sample is excited in the optical regime, where there is a strong response, and the phase is measured with a microwave interferometer. This method is very robust against external phase variations such as those introduced by temperature fluctuations, which is usually the dominant problem with interferometric measurements. We compare the proposed method with other traditional methods in a unified description to demonstrate that it has favorable scaling with the experimental parameters, such as power and detuning.