Observation of the Geometric Spin Hall Effect of Light

Abstract

The spin Hall effect of light (SHEL) is the photonic analogue of the spin Hall effect occurring for charge carriers in solid-state systems. This intriguing phenomenon manifests itself when a light beam refracts at an air-glass interface (conventional SHEL) or when it is projected onto an oblique plane, the latter effect being known as the geometric SHEL. It amounts to a polarization-dependent displacement perpendicular to the plane of incidence. In this work, we experimentally investigate the geometric SHEL for a light beam transmitted across an oblique polarizer. We find that the spatial intensity distribution of the transmitted beam depends on the incident state of polarization and its centroid undergoes a positional displacement exceeding one wavelength. This novel phenomenon is virtually independent from the material properties of the polarizer and, thus, reveals universal features of spin-orbit coupling.