Recently, with Capital Normal University (CNU) as the first unit, Prof. Liao Qing from the Department of Chemistry, CNU co-published a paper titled Photochemical Reaction Enabling the Engineering of Photonic Spin-Orbit Coupling in Organic-Crystal Optical Microcavities in Journal of the American Chemical Society (J. Am. Chem. Soc.), a top journey in the international chemistry field. This academic journal issued by the American Chemical Society was founded in 1879 and now is one of the top-level ones in the field of chemistry. In 2022, its impact factor reached 16.383.

Photonic spin-orbit coupling (SOC) can be used to control the spin and orbital freedom degrees of photons, which is of great significance to the development of spin photonics and topological photonic devices. In their research, the team selected an organic microcrystalline 9-anthracenecarboxylic acid (9AC) with photoisomerization properties. Photonic SOC occurs due to the high optical anisotropy in the 9AC crystal. When the microcavity is irradiated by ultraviolet light, the 9AC molecules will undergo photodimerization, causing the anisotropy of the crystal to change, which can destroy the resonance conditions of the optical mode and cause the circular polarization splitting to disappear. When the ultraviolet light irradiation stops, due to the depolymerization of 9AC dimer, it spontaneously returns to the monomer state, the anisotropy of the crystal is restored, and the circular polarization splitting of photons is re-implemented. This reversible SOC strategy provides a new approach for synthetic gauge field operation for future on-chip integrated photonics and topological photonic devices. Therefore, this paper was selected as a supplementary cover article.

Text link: <span style="Times New Roman","serif";color:windowtext;text-decoration: none;text-underline:none">https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.3c11373

X-MOL link: https://www.x-mol.com/news/880242