Optical helicity of unpolarized light

Forbes, Kayn ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8884-3496 (2022) Optical helicity of unpolarized light. Physical Review A, 105 (2). ISSN 2469-9926

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Abstract

Like energy and momentum, optical helicity is a fundamental dynamical property of light. In the prevalent plane wave and paraxial description of light the optical helicity is directly proportional to the degree of circular polarization, being zero for both linearly and unpolarized fields. Here it is shown that the nonparaxial fields generated by tightly focused optical vortices which have the phase factor exp (i ℓ ϕ) possess a contribution to the optical helicity density that is completely independent of the polarization state of the source paraxial field. In stark contrast to what is known in classical optics with plane waves and paraxial light, the physical consequence is that unpolarized light can exhibit optical activity and chiral light-matter interactions.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Funding Information: The author is grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding him through a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship (Grant No. ECF-2019-398) and thanks David L. Andrews for helpful discussions and Garth A. Jones for help with the figure.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	atomic and molecular physics, and optics ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3100/3107
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Chemistry
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Centre for Photonics and Quantum Science
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	09 Mar 2022 10:30
Last Modified:	09 Feb 2023 13:50
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/83951
DOI:	10.1103/PhysRevA.105.023524

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