Electric-Magnetic Geometric Phase

Geometric phases play an enormous role in optics and are generally associated with the evolution of light’s polarization state on the Poincaré sphere, or its spin on the sphere of spin directions. Here we put forward a new kind of optical geometric phase that appears exclusively in nonparaxial light, resulting from cyclic changes to the relative amplitude and phase between the electric and magnetic fields. This phase is naturally represented on a recently introduced `electric-magnetic’ sphere.