Abstract
When spinning particles, such as electrons and photons, undergo spin–orbit coupling, they can acquire an extra phase in addition to the well-known dynamical phase. This extra phase is called the geometric phase (also known as the Berry phase), which plays an important role in a startling variety of physical contexts such as in photonics, condensed matter, high-energy and space physics. The geometric phase was originally discussed for a cyclically evolving physical system with an Abelian evolution, and was later generalized to non-cyclic and non-Abelian cases, which are the most interesting fundamental subjects in this area and indicate promising applications in various fields. Here, we enable optical spin–orbit coupling in asymmetric microcavities and experimentally observe a non-cyclic optical geometric phase acquired in a non-Abelian evolution. Our work is relevant to fundamental studies and implies promising applications by manipulating photons in on-chip quantum devices.
Highlights
When spinning particles, such as electrons and photons, undergo spin–orbit coupling, they can acquire an extra phase in addition to the well-known dynamical phase
Spin–orbit coupling leads to two important observable effects, the geometric phase[1,2,3,4,5,6] and the spin Hall effect[3,6,7,8], which play an important role in a surprisingly large number of physical contexts[7,9,10,11,12]
The geometric phase has been generalized from a cyclic and Abelian context to non-cyclic and non-Abelian cases[13,14,15], which have been realized in many physical systems, such as spinning neutrons[16] and superconducting artificial atoms[17]
Summary
When spinning particles, such as electrons and photons, undergo spin–orbit coupling, they can acquire an extra phase in addition to the well-known dynamical phase. The polarization state of light is found to change in both orientation and eccentricity due to the occurrence of a geometric phase together with a mode conversion, generating a non-cyclic geometric phase in a non-Abelian evolution.
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