A Promising Mechanism for Photonic Spin Hall Effect and Refractive Index Sensing: Surface Exciton Polaritons

Abstract Surface polaritons are surface electromagnetic waves propagating along the surface of a medium, which play an important role in enhancing the photonic spin Hall effect (SHE). Among them, the successful excitation of surface exciton polaritons (SEPs) often requires cryogenic temperature, which limits their practical applications. In this contribution, a promising mechanism is presented for enhancing the photonic SHE by taking advantage of room‐temperature SEPs in a prism‐glass‐TDBC‐air configuration. By depositing the TDBC layer on plasmon active metal, the hybrid polariton, namely, surface plasmon exciton polariton (SPEP) can be observed, which gives rise to the further enhancement of photonic SHE. Furthermore, a refractive index sensor based on SEP (or SPEP) enhanced photonic SHE is proposed with the superior sensing performance. The results pave the way for the realization of giant photonic SHE in this simple and promising method, and offer the opportunity for developing highly sensitive optical sensors.