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Updated: Dec 28, 2025

Direct Imaging of Laser-driven Ultrafast Molecular Rotation
Published on: February 4, 2017
Direct Visualizing the Spin Hall Effect of Light via Ultrahigh-Order Modes
Hailang Dai1, Luqi Yuan1, Cheng Yin2
1The State Key Laboratory on Fiber Optic Local Area Communication Networks and Advanced Optical Communication Systems, School of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China.
Abstract:
We report an experiment showing the submillimeter Imbert-Fedorov shift from the ultrastrong spin-orbital angular momentum coupling, which is a photonic version of the spin Hall effect, by measuring the reflection of light from the surface of a birefringent symmetrical metal cladding planar waveguide. The light incidents at a near-normal incident angle and excites resonant ultrahigh-order modes inside the waveguide. A 0.16-mm displacement of separated reflected light spots corresponding to two polarization states is distinguishable by human eyes. In our experiment, we demonstrate the control of polarizations of light and the direct observation of the spin Hall effect of light, which opens an important avenue towards potential applications for optical sensing and quantum information processing, where the spin nature of photons exhibits key features.
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