Goos-Haenchen lateral displacements and angular deviations: When these optical effects offset each other

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how lateral displacements and angular deviations in optical beams transmitted through a right angle prism can offset each other, providing analytic expressions to optimize experimental conditions.

Contribution

It introduces an analytic model for the combined effects of lateral shifts and angular deviations in transmitted optical beams, enabling compensation strategies.

Findings

Derived an explicit expression for transmitted beam displacement and deviation.

Identified conditions where lateral displacement is offset by angular deviation.

Discussed experimental optimization for observing these effects.

Abstract

For optical beams, transmitted by a right angle prism, the Goos-Haenchen shift can never be seen as a pure effect. Indeed, the lateral displacement, caused by the total internal reflection, will always be accompanied by angular deviations generated by the transmission through the incoming and outgoing interfaces. This combined effect can be analysed by using the Taylor expansion of the Fresnel coefficients. The analytic expression found for the transmitted beam allows to determine the beam parameters, the incidence angles, and the axial distance for which lateral displacements are compensated by angular deviations. Proposals to optimize experimental implementations are also briefly discussed.