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  • Open Access

Quantized helicity in optical media

Neel Mackinnon, Jörg B. Götte, Stephen M. Barnett, and Niclas Westerberg*

  • *Contact author: Niclas.Westerberg@glasgow.ac.uk
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Phys. Rev. A 112, 053504 – Published 4 November, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/y5d5-6xxb

Abstract

We present an alternative approach to the definition of optical helicity in a medium. Our approach resolves the problem that duality transformations which simultaneously combine E with H and D with B are incompatible with linear constitutive relations. We find that the helicity density in a medium, as the conserved quantity associated with duality transforms, must contain an explicit contribution associated with the polarization and magnetization of the matter, and that it can be expressed naturally in terms of the elementary polarized excitations of the system. In media for which the helicity is conserved, each circular excitation carries a well-defined helicity. However, in a medium for which the helicity is not conserved, we find that the time-varying helicity can be viewed in terms of oscillations between different helicity eigenstates, analogous to neutrino oscillations. Here we explicitly study the helicity in homogeneous and lossless media but we believe that, differently to other choices, this helicity is readily generalizable to media that may be inhomogeneous, lossy, chiral or nonreciprocal.

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Phys. Rev. A 112, 053504– Published 4 November, 2025
  • Received 20 May 2025
  • Accepted 25 September 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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