Optical Spin Sorting Chain

TL;DR

This paper proposes a subwavelength nanoparticle chain waveguide that efficiently sorts optical spins, enabling unidirectional spin transport and spatial separation of spin states with enhanced miniaturization.

Contribution

It introduces a novel zigzag nanoparticle chain design that achieves efficient optical spin sorting and unidirectional transport at subwavelength scales, surpassing previous methods.

Findings

Achieved unidirectional optical spin propagation in nanoparticle chains.

Demonstrated spatial separation of up- and down-spins within the structure.

Showed robustness of the waveguide against bending and potential for miniaturization.

Abstract

Transverse spin angular momentum of light is a key concept in recent nanophotonics to realize unidirectional light transport in waveguides by spin-momentum locking. Herein we theoretically propose subwavelength nanoparticle chain waveguides that efficiently sort optical spins with engineerable spin density distributions. By arranging high-refractive-index nanospheres of different sizes in a zigzag manner, directional optical spin propagation is realized. The origin of the efficient spin transport is revealed by analyzing the dispersion relation and spin angular momentum density distributions. In contrast to conventional waveguides, the proposed asymmetric waveguide can spatially separate up- and down-spins and locate one parity inside and the other outside the structure. Moreover, robustness against bending the waveguide and its application as an optical spin sorter are presented. Compared to previous reports on spatial engineering of local spins in photonic crystal waveguides, we achieved substantial miniaturization of the entire footprint down to subwavelength scale.