Symmetry-breaking enabled topological phase transitions in spin-orbit optics

Abstract

The topological phase transitions (TPT) of light refers to a topological evolution from one type of spin-orbit interaction to another, which has been recently found in beam scattering at optical interfaces and propagation in uniaxial crystals. In this work, the focusing of off-axis and partially masked circular-polarization Gaussian beams are investigated by using of a full-wave theory. Moreover, two different types of spin-orbit interactions (i.e., spin-dependent vortex generation and photonic spin-Hall effect) in the focusing system are unified from the perspective of TPT. It is demonstrated that as the off-axis distance or the masked area increases, a TPT phenomenon in the focused optical field takes place, evolving from the spin-dependent vortex generation to the spin-Hall shift of the beam centroids. The intrinsic mechanism is attributed to the cylindrical symmetry-breaking of the system. This symmetry-breaking induced TPT based on the method of vortex mode decomposition is further examined. The main difference between the TPT phenomenon observed here and that trigged by oblique incidence at optical interfaces or oblique propagation in uniaxial crystals is also uncovered. Our findings provide fruitful insights for understanding the spin-orbit interactions in optics, providing an opportunity for unifying the TPT phenomena in various spin-orbit photonics systems.