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Observation of the all-optical Stern–Gerlach effect in nonlinear optics

Nature Photonics volume 16, pages 582–587 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Celebrating its centennial anniversary, the Stern–Gerlach experiment has proven to be one of the cornerstones of quantum mechanics, unravelling the quantized nature of the spin angular momentum, and being used in various applications ranging from matter-wave interferometry to weak measurements. Here we report an analogous all-optical Stern–Gerlach experiment in nonlinear optics, where the frequency of light acts as a pseudospin. We observe the splitting of light into two beams, each comprising a frequency-bin superposition, in the presence of a nonlinear coupling gradient. We further realize the phase-sensitive deflection of a distinct frequency-bin superposition into a single direction. Our work constitutes a frequency-domain all-optical coherent deflection of light, offering large bandwidths, fast switching rates and tunability, which are valuable for both classical and quantum information. Furthermore, our findings serve as experimental proof of concept for the emulation of spin transport phenomena using nonlinear optics.

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Fig. 1: Original and all-optical SG experiments.
Fig. 2: Experimental set-up of the all-optical SG effect.
Fig. 3: Far-field splitting for the idler input state |ωi〉.
Fig. 4: Coherent deflection of frequency-superposition eigenstates.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge fruitful discussions with R. Folman. A.K. is supported by the Adams Fellowship of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities. S.T.-M. is supported by the Shulamit Aloni scholarship. This work was funded by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 1415/17).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical Engineering, Fleischman Faculty of Engineering, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Ofir Yesharim, Steven Jackel, Giuseppe Di Domenico & Ady Arie

  2. Raymond and Beverly Sackler School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Aviv Karnieli & Sivan Trajtenberg-Mills

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  1. Ofir Yesharim
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Contributions

O.Y. and A.K. designed and conceived the experiments. O.Y. performed the experiments and analysed the data, with help from A.K., S.J. and G.D.D. O.Y. and A.K. performed the theoretical calculations. O.Y. and A.K. wrote the manuscript. S.J. designed and built the angle- and space-invariant phase shifter. G.D.D. and S.T.-M contributed to the final manuscript. S.T.-M helped design the adiabatic converter. A.A. supervised the study.

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Correspondence to Ady Arie.

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Nature Photonics thanks Mario Krenn and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Yesharim, O., Karnieli, A., Jackel, S. et al. Observation of the all-optical Stern–Gerlach effect in nonlinear optics. Nat. Photon. 16, 582–587 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-022-01035-6

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