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Updated: May 10, 2026

Femtosecond Laser Filaments for Use in Sub-Diffraction-Limited Imaging and Remote Sensing
Published on: April 25, 2019
Limits to superweak amplification of beam shifts
1Max-Planck-Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Noethnitzer Street 38, Dresden 01187, Germany. joerg.goette@physics.org
Abstract:
The magnitudes of beam shifts (Goos-Hänchen and Imbert-Fedorov, spatial and angular) are greatly enhanced when a reflected light beam is postselected by an analyzer, by analogy with superweak measurements in quantum theory. Particularly strong enhancements can be expected close to angles at which no light is transmitted for fixed initial and final polarizations. We derive a formula for the angular and spatial shifts at such angles (which includes the Brewster angle), and we show that their maximum size is limited by higher-order terms from the reflection coefficients occurring in the Artmann shift formula.
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