Artificial Rashba-Dresselhaus gauge field in anisotropic microcavities

I will present a summary of a recent work done together with the experimental group at the University of Warsaw. We observed the artificial Rashba-Dresselhaus spin-orbit interaction of photons in a liquid crystal–filled optical cavity. The gauge field was realized without the use of any metamaterial structuring and the same method can be implemented with any other uniaxially anisotropic material. This observation opens the door to photonic emulators of quantum Hamiltonians with internal degrees of freedom.