Spin Hall effect of light in inhomogeneous nonlinear medium

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the spin Hall effect of a polarized Gaussian beam (GB) in a smoothly inhomogeneous isotropic and nonlinear medium using the method of the eikonal-based complex geometrical optics which describes the phase front and cross-section of a light beam using the quadratic expansion of a complex-valued eikonal. The linear complex-valued eikonal terms are introduced to describe the polarization-dependent transverse shifts of the beam in inhomogeneous nonlinear medium which is called the spin Hall effect of beam. We know that the spin Hall effect of beam is affected by the nonlinearity of medium and include two parts, one originates from the coupling between the spin angular momentum and the extrinsic orbital angular momentum due to the curve trajectory of the center of gravity of the polarized GB and the other from the coupling between the spin angular momentum and the intrinsic orbital angular momentum due to the rotation of the beam with respect to the central ray.