Spin-orbit coupling of light in asymmetric microcavities.

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.

Achromatic vector vortex beams from a glass cone.

The reflection of light is governed by the laws first described by Augustin-Jean Fresnel: on internal reflection, light acquires a phase shift, which depends on its polarization direction with respect to the plane of incidence. For a conical reflector, the cylindrical symmetry is echoed in an angular variation of this phase shift, allowing us to create light modes with phase and polarization singularities. Here we observe the phase and polarization profiles of light that is back reflected from a solid glass cone and, in the case of circular input light, discover that not only does the beam contain orbital angular momentum but can trivially be converted to a radially polarized beam. Importantly, the Fresnel coefficients are reasonably stable across the visible spectrum, which we demonstrate by measuring white light polarization profiles. This discovery provides a highly cost-effective technique for the generation of broadband orbital angular momentum and radially polarized beams.

Goos-Hänchen shift for a rough metallic mirror.

We investigate experimentally the dependence of the Goos-Hänchen shift on the surface properties of an air-metal interface. The shift depends on the microscopic roughness of the metal surface but it is insensitive to the large-scale variations associated with surface non-flatness. Both an effective medium model of roughness and the Rayleigh-Rice theory of scattering are used to interpret the observed phenomenon.

Loss-induced transition of the Goos-Hänchen effect for metals and dielectrics.

We report a unifying approach to the Goos-Hänchen (GH) shifts on external optical reflection for metals and dielectrics in particular for the case of high losses, that is for a large imaginary part of the dielectric constant. In this regime metals and dielectrics have a similar GH shift which is in contrast to the low-loss regime where the metallic and dielectric forms of the GH shift are very different. When going from the low-loss to the high-loss regime we find that metals show a much more prominent transition; we present a condition on the dielectric constant which characterizes this transition. We illustrate our theoretical analysis with a realistic example of seven lossy materials.

"Aether drag" and moving images.

We contrast the two situations in which either a light beam is incident on a moving medium or a moving optical image is incident on a stationary medium. The principle of relativity suggests that the effects on the light of propagating through the medium should be similar. We find, however, that there are subtle differences which we can understand in terms of the relative alignment of the Poynting and wave vectors. Our analysis and experiments investigate both translational motion and rotation.