New investigations on the transverse spin of structured optical fields

Guided waves and surface waves can be taken as two typical examples of structured optical fields with the transverse spin. Analytical derivations are developed to demonstrate that (i) guided waves also carry the transverse spin that depends on the mean direction of propagation, which may have important applications in spin-dependent unidirectional optical interfaces; (ii) the quantization form of the transverse spin is for the first time revealed, which is not obvious and related to an ellipticity; (iii) from a unified point of view, the transverse spin can be attributed to the presence of an effective rest mass of structured optical fields; (iv) the transverse spin can also be described by the spin matrix of the photon field; (v) unlike a free optical field whose spin projection on the propagation direction is the only observable, owing to the effective rest mass, the spin projection of structured optical fields on other directions is also an observable, such that one can develop an optical analogy of spintronics. A preliminary idea about the potential applications of the transverse spin is presented, but an in-depth and complete study will be presented in our next work.

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