Observation of the optical spin Hall effect

The spin Hall effect consists of the generation of a spin current perpendicular to the charge current flow. Thirty-five years after its prediction by Dyakonov and Perel'(1), it is the focus of experimental and theoretical investigations and constitutes one of the most remarkable effects of spintronics. Owing to scattering and dephasing in electronic gases, it is difficult to observe and has only been demonstrated for the first time a few years ago(2-5). Recently, three of us have predicted the optical spin Hall effect(6), which consists of a separation in real space and momentum space of spin-polarized exciton-polaritons generated by a laser in a semiconductor microcavity(7). The separation takes place owing to a combination of elastic scattering of exciton-polaritons by structural disorder and an effective magnetic field coming from polarization splitting of the polariton states. The excitonic spin current is controlled by the linear polarization of the laser pump. Here, we report the first experimental evidence for this effect and demonstrate propagation of polariton spin currents over 100 mu m in a high-quality GaAs/AlGaAs quantum microcavity. By rotating the polarization plane of the exciting light, we were able to switch the directions of the spin currents.