Abstract
Photonic spin Hall effect (SHE) can be an effective sensor for determining the refractive index (RI) variation of a sensing medium. How to further improve its sensitivity is a very interesting and important issue. In this paper, we theoretically propose a weak measurement method for enhancing the sensitivity of the photonic SHE-based RI sensor by reducing the influence of the in-plane wavevector. Of particular interest, our results indicate that the sensitivity of the presented configuration reaches about 3.16 × 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-7</sup> RIU/μm which shows nearly two orders of magnitude improvement compared with the conventional one. Remarkably, this method can be applied for wide range of RI variation of the sensing medium while keeping the high sensitivity.
Highlights
When a linearly polarized light beam is reflected or refracted at the interface of different media, its left- and right-handed circularly polarized components will separate perpendicular to the incident plane, which induces the spin splitting of light [1], [2]
We can find that the influence of the in-plane wavevector can be reduced by 35 times if the waist w 1 is selected as 350 μm
It should be noted that the out-of-plane wavevector ky determines the distribution of electric field in y direction, which results in the photonic spin Hall effect (SHE)
Summary
When a linearly polarized light beam is reflected or refracted at the interface of different media, its left- and right-handed circularly polarized components will separate perpendicular to the incident plane, which induces the spin splitting of light [1], [2]. This interesting phenomenon called photonic spin Hall effect (SHE) is caused by the effective interaction between photons’ spin and trajectory (spin-orbit interaction of light) [3]–[6].
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