PHYS 232 REACTION PAPER

On Jacq Romeros Paper

Textbooks always tell us about the constancy of the speed of light in vacuum.
We are always told that light travels at c = 299792458 m/s in free space. They often
tell this without additional caveat: light travels at c in free space only if it is a plane
wave. Jacquiline Romero et al have shown that certain light waves, which are not
plane waves, have a speed less than c in free space.
The phenomenon of slow light is not new. In fact light is always slowed down
as it traverses a medium with non-unity index of refraction. Romero et al also tell us
in their paper that the group velocity of light waves inside a hollow cavity (vacuum)
waveguide is less than c. Their work is actually not at all conceptually different from
the light in a waveguide experiment. What they have shown is that, without the
necessity of a waveguide, certain light waves whose structure deviate from that of a
plane wave travel in free space with a group velocity less than c.
The structured light beams they have employed were Bessel and Gaussian
beams. Bessel beams are created by passing plane waves through an axicon lens.
By allowing the light to pass through the axicon, the values of the wave vector
components deviate from that of the plane wave. Similarly, Gaussian beams with
deviant wave vector components were created by passing light through a confocal
telescope. With the change in wave vector components comes the lower group
velocity. The low group velocity was observed by comparing the time-of-arrival of
plane wave photons with that of the Bessel beam and Gaussian beam photons using
a method called the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference.
What is interesting from this experiment, aside from having shown that some
kinds of light are slow in vacuum, is that this could well be extended to different
kinds of waves such as for example, gravitational waves, which are currently the
talk-of-the-town, with the recent BICEP2 result or should we say, non-result. Maybe
we could find structured gravitational waves, too and find out more about the
nature of these waves, IF they become observable.

On. Dr. Hermosas blog post

The post serves to introduce the reader to his entire research career as an
optical scientist. Most of his work stems from the extension of our understanding
about reflectionan idea that surprisingly isnt clearly understood. Dr. Hermosa
began by presenting common knowledge about reflection from Euclid and Newton.
He explained that Newton somehow had the gut feel that light foes not follow
predictions by geometric optics during reflection. He the introduced the GoosHanchen shift which is the forward shift of the centroid of the reflected beam from a
light beam with polarization parallel to the plane of incidence going from high to low
index. A perpendicular shift called the Imbert-Fedorov shift happens for ellipticallypolarized beam going from high to low index. In 2008, Osteen and Kwiat published
their results that for a linearly polarized beam undergoing reflection, the resultant
beam becomes left and right circularly polarized. In the same year, Hermosa et al
found that there are shifts that occur: Spatial GH shift, Spatial IF shift, Angular GH
shift, and Angular IF shift. These shifts depend on the opening angle of the beam
and its propagation.
All of the materials with index of refraction presented were dielectric. For
metals which have complex indices they found that for certain polarization, light will
travel backward during reflection, a backward spatial GH shift. For a focused beam,
angular and spatial GH and IF shifts occur simultaneously. When the spin state of
light is involved during metallic reflection, spatial IF shifts were observed for -45/45
polarized CP light and white light. Angular shifts occur only for white light. When
-45/45 polarized focused light is used, spatial and angular shifts are observed
simultaneously.
All in all, we find that shifts both spatial and angular depend on
1. Polarization of incident beam
2. Index of refraction
3. Opening angle
But why do shifts occur? Hermosa et al found that orbital angular momentum
play role and couples with the spatial and angular GH and IF shift of a LaguerreGaussian beam. Radial modes also come to play.