Realizing Optical Persistent Spin Helix and Stern-Gerlach Deflection in an Anisotropic Liquid Crystal Microcavity

Spin-orbit interactions which couple the spin of a particle with its momentum degrees of freedom lie at the center of spintronic applications. Of special interest in semiconductor physics are Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling. When equal in strength, the Rashba and Dresselhaus fields result in SU(2) spin rotation symmetry and emergence of the persistent spin helix only investigated for charge carriers in semiconductor quantum wells. Recently, a synthetic Rashba-Dresselhaus Hamiltonian was shown to describe cavity photons confined in a microcavity filled with optically anisotropic liquid crystal. In this Letter, we present a purely optical realization of two types of spin patterns corresponding to the persistent spin helix and the SternGerlach experiment in such a cavity. We show how the symmetry of the Hamiltonian results in spatial oscillations of the spin orientation of photons traveling in the plane of the cavity.