Arteaga Oriol, Garcia-Caurel Enric, Ossikovski Razvigor
Opt Express. 2019 Feb 18;27(4):4758-4768. doi: 10.1364/OE.27.004758.
In 1822 A. Fresnel described an experiment to separate a beam of light into its right- and left-circular polarization components using chiral interfaces. Fresnel's experiment combined three crystalline quartz prisms of alternating handedness to achieve a visible macroscopic separation between the two circular components. Such quartz polyprisms were rather popular optical components in XIXth century but today remain as very little known optical devices. This work shows the analogy between Fresnel's experiment and Stern-Gerlach experiment from quantum mechanics since both experiments produce selective deflection of particles (photons in case of Fresnel's method) according to their spin angular momentum. We have studied a historical quartz polyprism with eight chiral interfaces producing a large spatial separation of light by spin. We have also constructed a modified Fresnel biprism to produce smaller separations and we have examined the analogy with Stern-Gerlach apparatus for both strong and weak measurements. The polarimetric analysis of a Fresnel polyprism reveals that it acts as a spin angular momentum analyzer.
1822年，A. 菲涅耳描述了一个实验，该实验利用手性界面将一束光分离为其右旋和左旋圆偏振分量。菲涅耳的实验组合了三个旋向交替的晶体石英棱镜，以实现两个圆偏振分量之间明显的宏观分离。这种石英多棱镜在19世纪是相当流行的光学元件，但如今仍是鲜为人知的光学器件。这项工作展示了菲涅耳实验与量子力学中的斯特恩 - 盖拉赫实验之间的相似性，因为这两个实验都根据粒子（菲涅耳方法中的光子）的自旋角动量产生选择性偏转。我们研究了一个具有八个手性界面的历史悠久的石英多棱镜，它通过自旋产生了光的大空间分离。我们还构建了一个改进的菲涅耳双棱镜以产生较小的分离，并研究了其与斯特恩 - 盖拉赫装置在强测量和弱测量方面的相似性。对菲涅耳多棱镜的偏振分析表明，它起到了自旋角动量分析仪的作用。
