The effect of spectral width on Goos–Hanchen and Imbert–Fedorov shifts

Abstract

We study the Goos–Hanchen and Imbert–Fedorov shifts for quasi-monochromatic Gaussian beams near the Brewster angle, when the reflection is from a denser to a rarer medium. This is the case of interest in the usual experiments on reflectometry, etc. We have incorporated the effects of the finite linewidth of the quasi-monochromatic light and treated the cases of a Lorentzian and a Gaussian lineshape of the input light spectrum. This study of light with a finite spectral width was carried out for the more frequently studied case, namely reflection from a dense to a rare medium. We found that the shift is increased as compared to the monochromatic Gaussian beam, and is zero at the Brewster angle for a p polarized beam. The shift variation with angle of incidence near the Brewster and critical angles at different values of refractive index ratios is found. We also studied the shift variation for Hermite–Gauss beams around the Brewster angle when the reflection is from a rarer to a denser medium and compare this with our earlier results for the case when the reflection was from a denser to a rarer medium.