The Geometric Phase
P. Hariharan, Maitreyee Roy, Peter A. Robinson, J. W. O'Byrne · Journal of Modern Optics · 1993
The change in the phase of a beam of light produced by a cyclic change in its state of polarization is an example of the geometric phase that can be verified by interferometric measurements. This paper presents a quantum-field theoretical analysis of the geometric phase interferometer in the limit of a small photon number, as well as some experimental results that confirm that the optical effects due to the geometric phase persist down to the single-photon level.