• 文献标题:   Unveiling pseudospin and angular momentum in photonic graphene
  • 文献类型:   Article
  • 作  者:   SONG DH, PALTOGLOU V, LIU S, ZHU Y, GALLARDO D, TANG LQ, XU JJ, ABLOWITZ M, EFREMIDIS NK, CHEN ZG
  • 作者关键词:  
  • 出版物名称:   NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
  • ISSN:   2041-1723
  • 通讯作者地址:   Nankai Univ
  • 被引频次:   53
  • DOI:   10.1038/ncomms7272
  • 出版年:   2015

▎ 摘  要

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.