Mechanical action of the transverse spin flows in evanescent fields

Mechanical action caused by the optical forces connected with the canonical momentum density associated with the local wavevector or Belifante’s spin angular momentum, the helicity dependent and the helicity independent forces determined by spin momenta of different nature open attractive prospects to use optical structures for manipulating with minute quantities of matter that is of importance in nanophysics, nanooptics and nanotechnologies, precision chemistry and pharmacology and in numerous other areas. The main finding of our study consists in direct experimental demonstration of physical reality and mechanical action of recently discovered extraordinary transverse component of the spin angular momentum arising (in our case) in an evanescent light wave due to the total internal reflection of linearly polarized probing beam with azimuth 450 at the interface ‘birefringent plate–air’, which is oriented perpendicularly to the wave vector of an evanescent wave.

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