Photonic spin Hall effect in topological insulators
Abstract
In this paper we theoretically investigate the photonic spin Hall effect (SHE) of a Gaussian beam reflected from the interface between air and topological insulators (TIs). The photonic SHE is attributed to spin-orbit coupling and manifests itself as in-plane and transverse spin-dependent splitting. We reveal that the spin-orbit coupling effect in TIs can be routed by adjusting the axion angle variations. Unlike the transverse spin-dependent splitting, we find that the in-plane one is sensitive to the axion angle. It is shown that the polarization structure in magneto-optical Kerr effect is significantly altered due to the spin-dependent splitting in photonic SHE. We theoretically propose a weak measurement method to determine the strength of axion coupling by probing the in-plane splitting of photonic SHE.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1311.0556,
title = {Photonic spin Hall effect in topological insulators},
author = {Xinxing Zhou and Jin Zhang and Xiaohui Ling and Shizhen Chen and Hailu Luo and Shuangchun Wen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1311.0556},
year = {2015}
}