Highly Sensitive Temperature Sensing via Photonic Spin Hall Effect

Abstract

In this work, we propose a highly sensitive temperature sensor based on photonic spin Hall effect (PSHE).We find that, by involving the liquid crystal (LC) material, the spin spatial and angular shifts in PSHE are very sensitive to the tiny perturbation of temperature when the incident angle of light beam is near the Brewster and critical angles.Importantly, the phase transition from liquid crystal state to liquid state across the clearing point (CP) will lead to the transition of strong spin-orbit interaction to the weak one.During this process, we reveal that the sensitivity of our designed temperature sensor can reach a giant value with 8.27 cm/K which is one order of magnitude improvement compared with the previous Goos-Hänchen effect-based temperature sensor.This work provides an effective method for precisely determining the position of CP and actively manipulating the spin-orbit interaction.