Pancharatnam Phase and Berry Phase

Michele Cini

Narasimhaiengar Mukunda

Ravi Baijulal Bhandari

Eliahu Cohen, Hugo Larocque, Frédéric Bouchard +3 more

Nian-Hua Liu

We study the modulation of Pancharatnam-Berry phase by lonexugitudinal electro-optical modulator which is an uniaxial crystal inserted into Sagnac interferometer.Because the difference of optical paths between clockwise and anticlockwise loop is zero,under the condition of zero-phase-difference related to the optical paths,the Pancharatnam-Berry phase between clockwise and anticlockwise loop can be distinguished more favorably.The results show that when the applied voltage vary continuously,the Pancharatnam-Berry phase jumps twice due to the characteristics of uniaxial crystal,while the coherent superposition intensity vary continuously.

Luis A. Garza-Soto, Nathan A. Hagen, Dorilian Lopez-Mago

While Pancharatnam discovered the geometric phase in 1956, his work was not widely recognized until its endorsement by Berry in 1987, after which it received wide appreciation. However, because Pancharatnam's paper is unusually difficult to follow, his work has often been misinterpreted as referring to an evolution of states of polarization, just as Berry's work focused on a cycle of states, even though this consideration does not appear in Pancharatnam's work. We walk the reader through Pancharatnam's original derivation and show how Pancharatnam's approach connects to recent work in geometric phase. It is our hope to make this widely cited classic paper more accessible and better understood.