Weak Measurements Beyond the Aharonov-Albert-Vaidman Formalism

We extend the idea of weak measurements to the general case, provide a complete treatment and obtain results for both the regime when the pre-selected and post-selected states (PPS) are almost orthogonal and the regime when they are exactly orthogonal. We surprisingly find that for a fixed interaction strength, there may exist a maximum signal amplification and a corresponding optimum overlap of PPS to achieve it. For weak measurements in the orthogonal regime, we find interesting quantities that play the same role that weak values play in the non-orthogonal regime.