Photonic spin Hall effect for precision metrology

TL;DR

The paper reviews how the photonic spin Hall effect can be utilized for high-precision measurements of various physical parameters, leveraging weak measurements to detect tiny spin-dependent shifts.

Contribution

It presents a review of recent works demonstrating the application of photonic SHE in precision metrology for different material and physical property measurements.

Findings

Photonic SHE enables sensitive detection of nanometal film thickness.

Photonic SHE can identify the number of graphene layers.

Photonic SHE detects axion coupling strength in topological insulators.

Abstract

The photonic spin Hall effect (SHE) is generally believed to be a result of an effective spin-orbit coupling, which describes the mutual influence of the spin (polarization) and the trajectory of the light beam. The photonic SHE holds great potential for precision metrology owing to the fact that the spin-dependent splitting in photonic SHE are sensitive to the physical parameter variations of different systems. Remarkably, using the weak measurements, this tiny spin-dependent shifts can be detected with the desirable accuracy so that the corresponding physical parameters can be determined. Here, we will review some of our works on using photonic SHE for precision metrology, such as measuring the thickness of nanometal film, identifying the graphene layers, detecting the strength of axion coupling in topological insulators, and determining the magneto-optical constant of magnetic film.