Experimental observation of the orbital Hall effect of light through pure orbit–orbit interaction for randomly and radially polarized vortex beams

Abstract

The orbit–orbit interaction of light leads to fundamentally rich optical phenomena whose experimental exploration and theoretical understanding remain challenging. Here, we investigate polarization-independent vortex-induced beam shifts for light beams possessing random polarization and radial polarization. The experiments reveal an intriguing manifestation of the orbital Hall effect of light as a consequence of orbit–orbit interactions and resulting conservation of total angular momentum. An interferometric scheme is experimentally implemented to quantify the change in the phase structure of the orbital angular momentum carrying beam as signatures of the orbital Hall effect of light arising due to partial reflection at a dielectric interface. We also demonstrate, and thus corroborate, the conservation of total angular momentum for such vortex-induced beam shifts.