Optical Spin Hall Effect in Closed Elliptical Plasmonic Nanoslit with Noncircular Symmetry

Abstract

We investigated the optical spin Hall effect (OSHE) of the light field from a closed elliptical metallic curvilinear nanoslit instead of the usual truncated curvilinear nanoslit. By making use of the characteristic bright spots in the light field formed by the noncircular symmetry of the elliptical slit and by introducing a method to separate the incident spin component (ISC) and converted spin component (CSC) of the output field, the OSHE manifested in the spot shifts in the CSC was more clearly observable and easily measurable. The slope of the elliptical slit, which was inverse along the principal axes, provided a geometric phase gradient to yield the opposite shifts of the characteristic spots in centrosymmetry, with a double shift achieved between the spots. Regarding the mechanism of this phenomenon, the flip of the spin angular momentum (SAM) of CSC gave rise to an extrinsic orbital angular momentum corresponding to the shifts of the wavelet profiles of slit elements in the same rotational direction to satisfy the conservation law. The analytical calculation and simulation of finite-difference time domain were performed for both the slit element and the whole slit ellipse, and the evolutions of the spot shifts as well as the underlying OSHE with the parameters of the ellipse were achieved. Experimental demonstrations were conducted and had consistent results. This study could be of great significance for subjects related to the applications of the OSHE.

Keywords

• surface plasmons
• optical spin Hall effect
• geometric phases
• phase gradient