Vectorial spatial differentiation of optical beams with metal-dielectric multilayers enabled by spin Hall effect of light and resonant reflection zero

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method for vectorial optical differentiation using layered metal-dielectric structures, leveraging the spin Hall effect of light and resonant reflection to compute derivatives of a beam's profile with high precision.

Contribution

It proposes a novel layered MDM structure enabling isotropic vectorial differentiation of optical beams through resonance and spin Hall effects, supported by theoretical and numerical analysis.

Findings

High-quality vectorial differentiation achieved

Reflected intensity proportional to gradient magnitude

Theoretical and numerical results confirm effectiveness

Abstract

We theoretically describe and numerically investigate the operation of "vectorial" optical differentiation of a three-dimensional light beam, which consists in simultaneous computation of two partial derivatives of the incident beam profile with respect to two spatial coordinates in different transverse electric field components. It is implemented upon reflection of the beam from a layered structure by simultaneously utilizing the effect of optical resonance and the spin Hall effect of light. As an example of a layered structure performing this operation, we propose a three-layer metal-dielectric-metal (MDM) structure. We show that by choosing the parameters of the MDM structure, it is possible to achieve the so-called isotropic vectorial differentiation, for which the intensity of the reflected optical beam (squared electric field magnitude) is proportional to the squared absolute value of the gradient of the incident linearly polarized beam. The presented numerical simulation results demonstrate high-quality vectorial differentiation and confirm the developed theoretical description.