Abstract
Since Berry introduced topological phases to describe the adiabatic transport of the spin of particles in parameter space, they have become a practical and descriptive concept for understanding interference phenomena in many quantum mechanical systems. For the photon two different applications of this concept were found in crystal optics: (1) the optical activity of helically wound optical fibers and (2) the development of the state of polarization on the Poincaré sphere. We present a remarkable optical ‘‘nonlinearity’’ of certain polarizing interferometers, which we discovered by using the concept of the topological phase on the Poincaré sphere and we demonstrate it with a simple experiment.
- Received 2 April 1993
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.71.1530
©1993 American Physical Society