Unveiling pseudospin and angular momentum in photonic graphene

Daohong Song, Vassilis Paltoglou, Sheng Liu, Yi Zhu, Daniel Gallardo, Liqin Tang, Jingjun Xu (), Mark Ablowitz, Nikolaos K. Efremidis and Zhigang Chen ()
Additional contact information
Daohong Song: MOE Key Laboratory of Weak-Light Nonlinear Photonics, TEDA Applied Physics Institute and School of Physics, Nankai University
Vassilis Paltoglou: University of Crete
Sheng Liu: MOE Key Laboratory of Space Applied Physics and Chemistry, Shaanxi Key Laboratory of Optical Information Technology, School of Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University
Yi Zhu: Zhou Pei-Yuan Center for Applied Mathematics, Tsinghua University
Daniel Gallardo: San Francisco State University
Liqin Tang: MOE Key Laboratory of Weak-Light Nonlinear Photonics, TEDA Applied Physics Institute and School of Physics, Nankai University
Jingjun Xu: MOE Key Laboratory of Weak-Light Nonlinear Photonics, TEDA Applied Physics Institute and School of Physics, Nankai University
Mark Ablowitz: University of Colorado, 526 UCB
Nikolaos K. Efremidis: University of Crete
Zhigang Chen: MOE Key Laboratory of Weak-Light Nonlinear Photonics, TEDA Applied Physics Institute and School of Physics, Nankai University

Nature Communications, 2015, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract Pseudospin, an additional degree of freedom inherent in graphene, plays a key role in understanding many fundamental phenomena such as the anomalous quantum Hall effect, electron chirality and Klein paradox. Unlike the electron spin, the pseudospin was traditionally considered as an unmeasurable quantity, immune to Stern-Gerlach-type experiments. Recently, however, it has been suggested that graphene pseudospin is a real angular momentum that might manifest itself as an observable quantity, but so far direct tests of such a momentum remained unfruitful. Here, by selective excitation of two sublattices of an artificial photonic graphene, we demonstrate pseudospin-mediated vortex generation and topological charge flipping in otherwise uniform optical beams with Bloch momentum traversing through the Dirac points. Corroborated by numerical solutions of the linear massless Dirac-Weyl equation, we show that pseudospin can turn into orbital angular momentum completely, thus upholding the belief that pseudospin is not merely for theoretical elegance but rather physically measurable.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7272 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:6:y:2015:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms7272

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms7272

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().