Photonic Spin Hall Effect at Metasurfaces

Photonic Spin Hall Effect When charged carriers move in a magnetic field, they are deflected—an effect known as the Hall effect. Electrons possess charge and spin, a property related to magnetism. The symmetry of electromagnetism then allows for a spin Hall effect whereby the spin is deflected by an electric field. In optics, photons, too, have electric and magnetic components and should thus also exhibit a corresponding photonic spin Hall effect. Using designer metamaterial surfaces, Yin et al. (p. 1405) show that the spin-orbit coupling for photons can be amplified, giving rise to an observable photonic spin Hall effect. The polarization-dependent deflection of photons can be controlled with a designed metamaterial surface. The spin Hall effect (SHE) of light is very weak because of the extremely small photon momentum and spin-orbit interaction. Here, we report a strong photonic SHE resulting in a measured large splitting of polarized light at metasurfaces. The rapidly varying phase discontinuities along a metasurface, breaking the axial symmetry of the system, enable the direct observation of large transverse motion of circularly polarized light, even at normal incidence. The strong spin-orbit interaction deviates the polarized light from the trajectory prescribed by the ordinary Fermat principle. Such a strong and broadband photonic SHE may provide a route for exploiting the spin and orbit angular momentum of light for information processing and communication.

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