Geometric Photonic Spin Hall Effect with Metapolarization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a geometric photonic spin Hall effect (PSHE) driven by engineered polarization distributions, enabling flexible manipulation of spin-dependent shifts in light based purely on geometric phase, with potential applications across physical systems.

Contribution

The work presents a novel geometric PSHE mechanism based on metapolarization, distinct from previous light-matter interaction-based PSHE, allowing customizable polarization geometries for spin-dependent control.

Findings

Demonstrated spin-dependent shift in momentum space due to engineered polarization.

Showed manipulation of PSHE through polarization geometry tailoring.

Potential extension of the scheme to electron and atom beams.

Abstract

We develop a geometric photonic spin Hall effect (PSHE) which manifests as spin-dependent shift in momentum space. It originates from an effective space-variant Pancharatnam-Berry (PB) phase created by artificially engineering the polarization distribution of the incident light. Unlikely the previously reported PSHE involving the light-matter interaction, the resulting spin-dependent splitting in the geometric PSHE is purely geometrically depend upon the polarization distribution of light which can be tailored by assembling its circular polarization basis with suitably magnitude and phase. This metapolarization idea enables us to manipulate the geometric PSHE by suitably tailoring the polarization geometry of light. Our scheme provides great flexibility in the design of various polarization geometry and polarization-dependent application, and can be extrapolated to other physical system, such as electron beam or atom beam, with the similar spin-orbit coupling underlying.