Optical helicity, optical spin and related quantities in electromagnetic theory

By R. Cameron, Stephen M. Barnett, A. Yao. 2012

249 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine the optical helicity, the optical spin and the ij-infra-zilches in electromagnetic theory and show that these conserved quantities can be combined to form a new description of the angular momentum associated with optical polarization: one that is analogous to the familiar description of optical energy and linear momentum. The symmetries of Maxwell's equations that underlie the conservation of our quantities are presented and discussed. We explain that a similar but distinct set of quantities, Lipkin's zilches, describe the ‘angular momentum’ of the curl of the electromagnetic field, rather than the angular momentum of the electromagnetic field itself.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9a7237ae3579ade17ad3d456638bddc835a0c44a

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Franco Nori
2. K. Bliokh
3. A. Bekshaev
4. A. Yao
5. Stephen M. Barnett
6. Z. Jacob
7. T. Van Mechelen
8. Andrea Aiello

Citations in the corpus

• Universal spin-momentum locking of evanescent waves (2015, result): “We note that our approach is different but equivalent to the historic concept of the light beam tensor introduced by Fedorov [13] and the recently developed concept of the spin density [11, 14].”
• Discriminatory optical force for chiral molecules (2014, background): “In this context, it appears, in fact, that we could equally well have identified any one of an infinite number of lower- and higher-order extensions of h [71, 73, 82], amongst them, the 00-zilch density Z 000 [83, 84], which was re-introduced into the literature recently in connection with fluoresce”
• From transverse angular momentum to photonic wheels (2015, background): “The transverse and longitudinal field components in equation (7) do not represent an exact solution to Maxwell’s equations, but we can use both expressions to discuss several important aspects.”
• Extraordinary momentum and spin in evanescent waves (2013, background): “Recently, it caused considerable attention [5,16,17] in connection with the fundamental dual ‘electric–magnetic’ symmetry of Maxwell equations [18–20] and optical interaction with chiral particles [21–24].”