Engineering spin-orbit synthetic Hamiltonians in liquid-crystal optical cavities

Katarzyna Rechcinska, Mateusz Król, Rafał Mazur, Przemysław Morawiak, Rafał Mirek, Karolina Łempicka, Witold Bardyszewski, Michał Matuszewski, Przemysław Kula, Wiktor Piecek, Pavlos G. Lagoudakis*, Barbara Pietka, Jacek Szczytko

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

119 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Spin-orbit interactions lead to distinctive functionalities in photonic systems. They exploit the analogy between the quantum mechanical description of a complex electronic spin-orbit system and synthetic Hamiltonians derived for the propagation of electromagnetic waves in dedicated spatial structures. We realize an artificial Rashba-Dresselhaus spin-orbit interaction in a liquid crystal–filled optical cavity. Three-dimensional tomography in energy-momentum space enabled us to directly evidence the spin-split photon mode in the presence of an artificial spin-orbit coupling. The effect is observed when two orthogonal linear polarized modes of opposite parity are brought near resonance. Engineering of spin-orbit synthetic Hamiltonians in optical cavities opens the door to photonic emulators of quantum Hamiltonians with internal degrees of freedom.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)727-730
Number of pages4
JournalScience
Volume366
Issue number6466
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 8 Nov 2019
Externally publishedYes

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