No Arabic abstract
We develop a novel theoretical framework describing polariton-enhanced spin-orbit interaction of light on the surface of two-dimensional media. Starting from the integral formulation of electromagnetic scattering, we exploit the reduced dimensionality of the system to introduce a quantum-like formalism particularly suitable to fully take advantage of rotational invariance. Our description is closely related to that of a fictitious spin one quantum particle living in the atomically thin medium, whose orbital, spin and total angular momenta play a key role in the scattering process. Conservation of total angular momentum upon scattering enables to physically unveil the interaction between radiation and the two-dimensional material along with the detailed exchange processes among orbital and spin components. In addition, we specialize our model to doped extended graphene, finding such spin-orbit interaction to be dramatically enhanced by the excitation of surface plasmon polaritons propagating radially along the graphene sheet. We provide several examples of the enormous possibilities offered by plasmon-enhanced spin-orbit interaction of light including vortex generation, mixing, and engineering of tunable deep subwavelength arrays of optical traps in the near field. Our results hold great potential for the development of nano-scaled quantum active elements and logic gates for the manipulation of hyper-entangled photon states as well as for the design of artificial media imprinted by engineered photonic lattices tweezing cold atoms into the desired patterns.
The edge diffraction of a homogeneously polarized light beam is studied theoretically based on the paraxial optics and Fresnel-Kirchhoff approximation, and the dependence of the diffracted beam pattern of the incident beam polarization is predicted. If the incident beam is circularly polarized, the trajectory of the diffracted beam centre of gravity experiences a small angular deviation from the geometrically expected direction. The deviation is parallel to the screen edge and reverses the sign with the polarization handedness; it is explicitly calculated for the case of a Gaussian incident beam with plane wavefront. This effect is a manifestation of the spin-orbit interaction of light and can be interpreted as a revelation of the internal spin energy flow immanent in circularly polarized beams. It also exposes the vortex character of the weak longitudinal field component associated with the circularly polarized incident beam.
We give an exact self-consistent operator description of the spin and orbital angular momenta, position, and spin-orbit interactions of nonparaxial light in free space. Both quantum-operator formalism and classical energy-flow approach are presented. We apply the general theory to symmetric and asymmetric Bessel beams exhibiting spin- and orbital-dependent intensity profiles. The exact wave solutions are clearly interpreted in terms of the Berry phases, quantization of caustics, and Hall effects of light, which can be readily observed experimentally.
We study interfaces between graphene and graphane. If the interface is oriented along a zigzag direction, edge states are found which exhibit a strong amplification of effects related to the spin-orbit interaction. The enhanced spin splitting of the edge states allows a conversion between valley polarization and spin polarization at temperatures near one Kelvin. We show that these edge states give rise to quantum spin and/or valley Hall effects.
Optical isolators are an important building block in photonic computation and communication. In traditional optics, isolators are realized with magneto-optical garnets. However, it remains challenging to incorporate such materials on an integrated platform because of the difficulty in material growth and bulky device footprint. Here, we propose an ultracompact integrated isolator by exploiting graphenes magneto-optical property on a silicon-on-insulator platform. The photonic nonreciprocity is achieved because the cyclotrons in graphene experiencing different optical spin exhibit different response to counterpropagating light. Taking advantage of cavity resonance effects, we have numerically optimized a device design, which shows excellent isolation performance with the extinction ratio over 45 dB and the insertion loss around 12 dB at a wavelength near 1.55 um. Featuring graphenes CMOS compatibility and substantially reduced device footprint, our proposal sheds light to monolithic integration of nonreciprocal photonic devices.
The photonic spin Hall effect (SHE) can be regarded as a direct optical analogy of the SHE in electronic systems where a refractive index gradient plays the role of electric potential. However, it has been demonstrated that the effective refractive index fails to adequately explain the lightmatter interaction in atomically thin crystals. In this paper, we examine the spin-orbit interaction on the surface of the freestanding atomically thin crystals. We find that it is not necessary to involve the effective refractive index to describe the spin-orbit interaction and the photonic SHE in the atomically thin crystals. The strong spin-orbit interaction and giant photonic SHE have been predicted, which can be explained as the large polarization rotation of plane-wave components in order to satisfy the transversality of photon.