Observation of the Geometric Spin Hall Effect of Light

Abstract

The spin Hall effect of light (SHEL) is the photonic analogue of the spin Hall effect occurring for charge carriers in solid-state systems. This intriguing phenomenon manifests itself when a light beam refracts at an air-glass interface (conventional SHEL) or when it is projected onto an oblique plane, the latter effect being known as the geometric SHEL. It amounts to a polarization-dependent displacement perpendicular to the plane of incidence. In this work, we experimentally investigate the geometric SHEL for a light beam transmitted across an oblique polarizer. We find that the spatial intensity distribution of the transmitted beam depends on the incident state of polarization and its centroid undergoes a positional displacement exceeding one wavelength. This novel phenomenon is virtually independent from the material properties of the polarizer and, thus, reveals universal features of spin-orbit coupling.

Spin-Hall effect of light at a tilted polarizer

“…In fact, the authors of Ref. [21] claimed that they observed "a novel kind of the geometric SHEL", different from that in Ref. [16].…”

“…This remarkable effect also occurs for vortex beams carrying orbital angular momentum [17,18], as well as for relativistically Lorentz-transformed beams (i.e., for space-time tilted crosssections) [19,20]. The geometric SHEL was eventually observed experimentally as a SHEL of a beam transmitted through a tilted dichroic polarizer [21]. In fact, the authors of Ref.…”

Strong spin-orbit interaction of light on the surface of atomically thin crystals

“…The photonic SHE can be regarded as a direct optical analogy of the SHE in electronic systems [17][18][19][20][21] where the spin electrons and electric potential are replaced by spin photons and a refractive index gradient, respectively. The analogy has been extensively demonstrated effective for the photonic SHE in 3D bulk crystals [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. However, the effective refractive index fails to adequately explain the light-matter interaction in 2D atomic crystals.…”

Enhancing photonic spin Hall effect via long-range surface plasmon resonance

“…So far, it has been widely accepted that photonic SHE is a direct result of the spin-orbit interaction of photons [8,9], which satisfies the fundamental law of angular momentum conservation of light [5,6,10]. Due to the profound connotations and potential applications, photonic SHE has attracted considerable attention since its discovery [11][12][13][14][15][16][17].…”