Radial spin Hall effect of light

Abstract

We propose and realize a radial spin Hall effect (SHE) of light by using a dielectric metasurface. The metasurface with radially varying optical axes introduces a Pancharatnam-Berry (PB) geometrical phase to the incident light. The spatial gradient of PB phase accounts for a shift in the momentum space and thus leads the light to split radially into two concentric rays with opposite spin in the position space, which is called a radial SHE. Further experiments verify that the magnitude of the splitting increases with the rotation rate of the optical-axis orientation and the propagation distance, thereby allowing for macroscopic observation of the SHE. We also find that the phase of the incident light influences the profiles of the two split rays, while the polarization determines their intensities. The results provide methods to tune the SHE of light by engineering metasurfaces and modulating the incident light, and this radial SHE may be extrapolated to other physical systems.