Probing the Broken Spatial Symmetry of a Stratified Medium with Structured Light
Abstract
We study theoretically near-symmetric resonant stratified media to show how a tiny broken spatial symmetry can effectively be probed by structured light with or without orbital angular momentum. This is achieved by examining both the in-plane and out of plane Goos-Hanchen and Imbert Fedorov shifts, respectively, in the reflected light, magnified by resonant enhancement and when needed with weak value amplification. We show that non-reciprocity in reflection for illumination from opposite ends can result in different shifts, even to the extent of shifts with opposite signs for tiny imbalance resulting from the broken symmetry. Our methodology is applicable to any general stratified medium with homogeneous and isotropic constituent layers being responsive to any entity that may cause such symmetry breaking - including temperature, refractive index, displacement etc. in the near symmetric case. This may have possible use for sensing applications.
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BibTeX
@misc{maiti2026probing,
title = {{Probing the Broken Spatial Symmetry of a Stratified Medium with Structured Light}},
author = {Arani Maiti and Sauvik Roy and Nirmalya Ghosh and Ayan Banerjee and Subhasish Dutta Gupta},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2606.14065},
eprint = {2606.14065},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14065},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Probing the Broken Spatial Symmetry of a Stratified Medium with Structured Light
AU - Arani Maiti
AU - Sauvik Roy
AU - Nirmalya Ghosh
AU - Ayan Banerjee
AU - Subhasish Dutta Gupta
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/16
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2606.14065
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14065
AB - We study theoretically near-symmetric resonant stratified media to show how a tiny broken spatial symmetry can effectively be probed by structured light with or without orbital angular momentum. This is achieved by examining both the in-plane and out of plane Goos-Hanchen and Imbert Fedorov shifts, respectively, in the reflected light, magnified by resonant enhancement and when needed with weak value amplification. We show that non-reciprocity in reflection for illumination from opposite ends can result in different shifts, even to the extent of shifts with opposite signs for tiny imbalance resulting from the broken symmetry. Our methodology is applicable to any general stratified medium with homogeneous and isotropic constituent layers being responsive to any entity that may cause such symmetry breaking - including temperature, refractive index, displacement etc. in the near symmetric case. This may have possible use for sensing applications.
ER -