Old experiments in new light: Young's double-slit and Stern-Gerlach experiments in liquid crystal microcavities

Mateusz Król, Katarzyna Rechcińska, Helgi Sigurdsson, Przemysław Oliwa, Rafał Mazur, Przemysław Morawiak, Wiktor Piecek, Przemysław Kula, Pavlos Lagoudakis, Michał Matuszewski, Witold Bardyszewski, Barbara Piętka, Jacek Szczytko

Published 2021-04-19Version 1

Spin-orbit interactions which couple spin of a particle with its momentum degrees of freedom lie at the center of spintronic applications. Of special interest in semiconductor physics are Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling (SOC). When equal in strength, the Rashba and Dresselhaus fields result in SU(2) spin rotation symmetry and emergence of the persistent spin helix (PSH) only investigated for charge carriers in semiconductor quantum wells. Recently, a synthetic Rashba-Dresselhaus Hamiltonian was shown to describe cavity photons confined in a microcavity filled with optically anisotropic liquid crystal. In this work, we present a purely optical realisation of two types of spin patterns corresponding to PSH and the Stern-Gerlach experiment in such a cavity. We show how the symmetry of the Hamiltonian results in spatial oscillations of the spin orientation of photons travelling in the plane of the cavity.