Rotational doppler shift induced by spin-orbit coupling of light at spinning metasurfaces

Abstract

© 2017 Optical Society of America. The interaction of light with spinning objects can lead to a frequency shift as a result of the transferred angular momentum. Subwavelength plasmonic nanostructures on an optical surface provide an efficient platform for local light manipulation and thus can be utilized for such momentum exchanges. Here we demonstrate reflective-type plasmonic metasurface q-plates based on the geometric Pancharatnam-Berry phase that are capable of changing the spin and orbital angular momentum of light. When these metasurfaces rotate at a constant angular speed, we observe a rotational Doppler frequency shift of the reflected light, which depends on the total angular momentum transfer. The flexibility in the design of the metasurfaces even enables complex reflective phase masks that can transfer different orbital angular momenta, at the same time, to the beam. Our experiments show that such complex metasurface phase masks can be used to obtain spatially variant Doppler shift in the reflected beam profile.