Communications of the ACM
Berkeley Lab Researchers Use Metamaterials to Observe Giant Photonic Spin Hall Effect
Light propagating through a metamaterial follows a curved trajectory that drags light with different circular polarization in opposite transverse directions to produce a giant photonic Spin Hall effect.
Credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researchers say they developed a two-dimensional sheet of gold nanoantennas that recorded the strongest signal yet of the photonic spin Hall effect, an optical phenomenon of quantum mechanics that could play a major role in the future of computing.
"We also demonstrated that metamaterials not only allow us to control the propagation of light but also allows control of circular polarization," which could have a significant impact for information encoding and processing, says Berkeley Lab researcher Xiang Zhang.
The spin Hall effect describes the curved path that spinning electrons follow as they move through a semiconductor. "Light moving through a metal also displays the spin Hall effect but the photonic spin Hall effect is very weak because the spin angular momentum of photons and spin-orbit interactions are very small," says Berkeley Lab researcher Xiaobo Yin.
The new metamaterial makes the photonic spin Hall effect observable with a camera. "The controllable spin-orbit interaction and momentum transfer between spin and orbital angular momentum allows us to manipulate the information encoded on the polarization of light, much like the 0 and 1 of today’s electronic devices," Yin says. "But photonic devices could encode more information and provide greater information security than conventional electronic devices."
From Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
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