The spin Hall effect (SHE) of light, as an analogue of the SHE in electronic systems, is a promising candidate for investigating the SHE in semiconductor spintronics/valleytronics, high-energy physics and condensed matter physics, owing to their similar topological nature in the spin–orbit interaction. The SHE of light exhibits unique potential for exploring the physical properties of nanostructures, such as determining the optical thickness, and the material properties of metallic and magnetic thin films and even atomically thin two-dimensional materials. More importantly, it opens a possible pathway for controlling the spin states of photons and developing next-generation photonic spin Hall devices as a fundamental constituent of the emerging spinoptics. In this review, based on the viewpoint of the geometric phase gradient, we give a detailed presentation of the recent advances in the SHE of light and its applications in precision metrology and future spin-based photonics.

The spin Hall effect (SHE) of light is a useful metrological tool for characterizing the structure parameters' variations of nanostructure. In this letter, we propose using the SHE of light to identify the graphene layers. This technique is based on the mechanism that the transverse displacements in SHE of light are sensitive to the variations of graphene layer numbers.

We theorize the spin Hall effect of light (SHEL) on a nanometal film and demonstrate it experimentally via weak measurements. A general propagation model to describe the relationship between the spin-orbit coupling and the thickness of the metal film is established. It is revealed that the spin-orbit coupling in the SHEL can be effectively modulated by adjusting the thickness of the metal film, and the transverse displacement is sensitive to the thickness of metal film in a certain range for horizontal polarization light. Importantly, a large negative transverse shift can be observed as a consequence of the combined contribution of the ratio and the phase difference of Fresnel coefficients.

We theorize an enhanced and switchable spin Hall effect (SHE) of light near the Brewster angle on reflection and demonstrate it experimentally. The obtained spin-dependent splitting reaches 3200 nm near the Brewster angle, which is 50 times larger than the previously reported values in refraction. We find that the amplifying factor in weak measurement is not a constant, which is significantly different from that in refraction. As an analogy of SHE in an electronic system, a switchable spin accumulation in SHE of light is detected. We were able to switch the direction of the spin accumulations by slightly adjusting the incident angle.

The photonic spin Hall effect (SHE) in the reflection and refraction at an interface is very weak because of the weak spin-orbit interaction. Here, we report the observation of a giant photonic SHE in a dielectric-based metamaterial. The metamaterial is structured to create a coordinate-dependent, geometric Pancharatnam–Berry phase that results in an SHE with a spin-dependent splitting in momentum space. It is unlike the SHE that occurs in real space in the reflection and refraction at an interface, which results from the momentum-dependent gradient of the geometric Rytov–Vladimirskii–Berry phase. We theorize a unified description of the photonic SHE based on the two types of geometric phase gradient, and we experimentally measure the giant spin-dependent shift of the beam centroid produced by the metamaterial at a visible wavelength. Our results suggest that the structured metamaterial offers a potential method of manipulating spin-polarized photons and the orbital angular momentum of light and thus enables applications in spin-controlled nanophotonics.

In this work, we develop a hybrid-order Poincaré sphere to describe the evolution of polarization states of wave propagation in inhomogeneous anisotropic media. We extend the orbital Poincaré sphere and high-order Poincaré sphere to a more general form. Polarization evolution in inhomogeneous anisotropic media with special geometry can be conveniently described by state evolution along the longitude line on the hybrid-order Poincaré sphere. Similar to that in previously proposed Poincaré spheres, the Berry curvature can be regarded as an effective magnetic field with monopole centered at the origin of sphere and the Berry connection can be interpreted as the vector potential. Both the Berry curvature and the Pancharatnam-Berry phase on the hybrid-order Poincaré sphere are demonstrated to be proportional to the variation of total angular momentum. Our scheme provides a convenient method to describe the spin-orbit interaction in inhomogeneous anisotropic media.