Geometric Photonic Spin Hall Effect with Metapolarization

Abstract

We develop a geometric photonic spin Hall effect (PSHE) which manifests as spin-dependent shift in momentum space. It originates from an effective space-variant Pancharatnam-Berry (PB) phase created by artificially engineering the polarization distribution of the incident light. Unlikely the previously reported PSHE involving the light-matter interaction, the resulting spin-dependent splitting in the geometric PSHE is purely geometrically depend upon the polarization distribution of light which can be tailored by assembling its circular polarization basis with suitably magnitude and phase. This metapolarization idea enables us to manipulate the geometric PSHE by suitably tailoring the polarization geometry of light. Our scheme provides great flexibility in the design of various polarization geometry and polarization-dependent application, and can be extrapolated to other physical system, such as electron beam or atom beam, with the similar spin-orbit coupling underlying.