Spin photonics and spin-photonic devices with dielectric metasurfaces

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of dielectric metasurfaces with spatially varying birefringence to control photonic spin states, develop a hybrid-order Poincare sphere for spin evolution, and design spin-photonic devices like spin filters and beam splitters.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid-order Poincare sphere to describe spin state evolution and demonstrates novel spin-photonic device designs using dielectric metasurfaces.

Findings

Spin-dependent Pancharatnam-Berry phase enables spin Hall effect.

Dielectric metasurfaces allow flexible design of spin filters.

Control of spin states via Berry curvature and angular momentum variation.

Abstract

Dielectric metasurfaces with spatially varying birefringence and high transmission efficiency can exhibit exceptional abilities for controlling the photonic spin states. We present here some of our works on spin photonics and spin-photonic devices with metasurfaces. We develop a hybrid-order Poincare sphere to describe the evolution of spin states of wave propagation in the metasurface. Both the Berry curvature and the Pancharatnam-Berry phase on the hybrid-order Poincare sphere are demonstrated to be proportional to the variation of total angular momentum. Based on the spin-dependent property of Pancharatnam-Berry phase, we find that the photonic spin Hall effect can be observed when breaking the rotational symmetry of metasurfaces. Moreover, we show that the dielectric metasurfaces can provide great flexibility in the design of novel spin-photonic devices such as spin filter and spin-dependent beam splitter.