Strong spin-orbit interaction of light on the surface of atomically thin crystals

The photonic spin Hall effect (SHE) can be regarded as a direct optical analogy of the SHE in electronic systems where a refractive index gradient plays the role of an electric potential. However, it has been demonstrated that the effective refractive index fails to adequately explain the light-matter interaction in atomically thin crystals. In this paper, we examine the spin-orbit interaction on the surface of the freestanding atomically thin crystals. We find that it is not necessary to involve the effective refractive index to describe the spin-orbit interaction and the photonic SHE in the atomically thin crystals. The strong spin-orbit interaction and giant photonic SHE are predicted, which can be explained as the large polarization rotation of plane-wave components in order to satisfy the transversality of photon polarization.