Demonstration of a quasi-scalar angular Goos-Hanchen effect

We show experimentally that the angular Goos-Hanchen (GH) effect can be easily observed, also without employing its resonant enhancement at Brewster incidence. An s-polarized beam was used to decouple the polarization from the propagation dynamics of the beam. We found that, in this case, the angular GH effect can be strongly enhanced by increasing the angular aperture of the Gaussian beam. Our experiments suggest a route toward observing the angular GH effect for true scalar waves, such as acoustic waves and quantum matter waves. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America