2025/09/08 by Yahong Chen, Chen, Yahong, Sergey A. Ponomarenko +1
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Laser-Matter Interactions and Applications #Optical Polarization and Ellipsometry #Optical and Acousto-Optic Technologies #Optics (physics.optics)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.06263
openalex publication_date 2025/09/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
As a paraxial wave packet is reflected or refracted from a planar interface separating two material media, it experiences spatial and angular shifts of its center position with respect to predictions of the geometrical ray picture. These in-plane and out-of-plane beam shifts are known as Goos-Hänchen and Imbert-Fedorov shifts, respectively. We discover a universal link between the phase-space nonseparability of an incident wave packet of any degree of spatial coherence and the reflected beam shifts. We unveil coherence Goos-Hänchen and coherence Hall effects, absent in the fully coherent limit. While the former effect can trigger a pronounced enhancement of the spatial Goos-Hänchen shift, the latter enables control of the spatial Imbert-Fedorov shift, from complete cancellation at a certain incidence angle to dramatic enhancement of the shift to giant magnitudes for nearly incoherent incident wave packets. Our results are equally applicable to optical, X-ray, neutron, as well as matter waves, and they showcase novel phenomena in wave-matter interactions.