Old experiments in new light: Young's double-slit and Stern-Gerlach experiments in liquid crystal microcavities

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates optical analogues of classic quantum experiments, like Young's double-slit and Stern-Gerlach, using liquid crystal microcavities to explore spin patterns and symmetries in photon behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optical system that simulates quantum spin phenomena, revealing new insights into spin-orbit interactions with liquid crystal microcavities.

Findings

Observation of spatial spin oscillations in photons

Realization of persistent spin helix patterns

Optical simulation of Stern-Gerlach experiment

Abstract

Spin-orbit interactions which couple spin of a particle with its momentum degrees of freedom lie at the center of spintronic applications. Of special interest in semiconductor physics are Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling (SOC). When equal in strength, the Rashba and Dresselhaus fields result in SU(2) spin rotation symmetry and emergence of the persistent spin helix (PSH) only investigated for charge carriers in semiconductor quantum wells. Recently, a synthetic Rashba-Dresselhaus Hamiltonian was shown to describe cavity photons confined in a microcavity filled with optically anisotropic liquid crystal. In this work, we present a purely optical realisation of two types of spin patterns corresponding to PSH and the Stern-Gerlach experiment in such a cavity. We show how the symmetry of the Hamiltonian results in spatial oscillations of the spin orientation of photons travelling in the plane of the cavity.