Giant field enhancement in high-index dielectric subwavelength particles

Strong Plasmon-Mie Resonance in Si@Pd Core-Ω Shell Nanocavity

The surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) can be used to enhance the generation of the hot electrons in plasmon metal nanocavity. In this paper, Pd nanomembrane (NMB) is sputtered on the surface of Si nanosphere (NS) on glass substrate to form the Si@Pd core-Ω shell nanocavity. A plasmon-Mie resonance is induced in the nanocavity by coupling the plasmon resonance with the Mie resonance to control the optical property of Si NS. When this nanocavity is excited by near-infrared-1 (NIR-1, 650 nm-900 nm) femtosecond (fs) laser, the luminescence intensity of Si NS is dramatically enhanced due to the synergistic interaction of plasmon and Mie resonance. The generation of resonance coupling regulates resonant mode of the nanocavity to realize multi-dimensional nonlinear optical response, which can be utilized in the fields of biological imaging and nanoscale light source.

Multifunctional and Transformative Metaphotonics with Emerging Materials

Future technologies underpinning multifunctional physical and chemical systems and compact biological sensors will rely on densely packed transformative and tunable circuitry employing nanophotonics. For many years, plasmonics was considered as the only available platform for subwavelength optics, but the recently emerged field of resonant metaphotonics may provide a versatile practical platform for nanoscale science by employing resonances in high-index dielectric nanoparticles and metasurfaces. Here, we discuss the recently emerged field of metaphotonics and describe its connection to material science and chemistry. For tunabilty, metaphotonics employs a variety of the recently highlighted materials such as polymers, perovskites, transition metal dichalcogenides, and phase change materials. This allows to achieve diverse functionalities of metasystems and metasurfaces for efficient spatial and temporal control of light by employing multipolar resonances and the physics of bound states in the continuum. We anticipate expanding applications of these concepts in nanolasers, tunable metadevices, metachemistry, as well as a design of a new generation of chemical and biological ultracompact sensing devices.

Full-wave electromagnetic modes and hybridization in nanoparticle dimers

The plasmon hybridization theory is based on a quasi-electrostatic approximation of the Maxwell’s equations. It does not take into account magnetic interactions, retardation effects, and radiation losses. Magnetic interactions play a dominant role in the scattering from dielectric nanoparticles. The retardation effects play a fundamental role in the coupling of the modes with the incident radiation and in determining their radiative strength; their exclusion may lead to erroneous predictions of the excited modes and of the scattered power spectra. Radiation losses may lead to a significant broadening of the scattering resonances. We propose a hybridization theory for non-Hermitian composite systems based on the full-Maxwell equations that, overcoming all the limitations of the plasmon hybridization theory, unlocks the description of dielectric dimers. As an example, we decompose the scattered field from silicon and silver dimers, under different excitation conditions and gap-sizes, in terms of dimer modes, pinpointing the hybridizing isolated-sphere modes behind them.

Anisotropic light scattering by prismatic semiconductor nanowires

Anisotropic transverse light scattering by prismatic nanowires is a natural outcome of their geometry. In this work, we perform numerical calculations of the light scattering characteristics for nanowires in the optical and near-infrared range and explore the possibility of tuning the directivity by changing the angle of light incidence. The scattering cross section and the directivity of the scattered light when it is incident perpendicular to a facet or to an edge of the prism are investigated both with transverse electric and with transverse magnetic polarizations. The phenomenology includes Mie resonances and guided modes yielding together rich and complex spectra. We consider nanowires with hexagonal, square and triangular cross sections. The modes that are most sensitive to the incidence angle are the hexapole for the hexagonal case and the quadrupole for the square case. Higher order modes are also sensitive, but mostly for the square geometry. Our results indicate the possibility of a flexible in-situ tunability of the directivity simply by rotating the nanowire profile relatively to the direction of the incident light which could offer potential advantages in applications such as switching or sensing.

Anapole: Its birth, life, and death

Despite the recent extensive study of the nonradiating (anapole) mode in the resonant light scattering by nanoparticles, the key questions, about the dynamics of its excitation at the leading front of the incident pulse and collapse behind the trailing edge, still remain open. We answer the questions, first, by direct numerical integration of the complete set of the Maxwell equations, describing the scattering of a rectangular laser pulse by a dielectric cylinder. The simulation shows that while the excitation and the collapse periods, both have the same characteristic time-scale, the dynamics of these processes are qualitatively different. The relaxation to the steady-state scattering at the leading front is accompanied by high-amplitude oscillatory modulations of the envelope of the basic electromagnetic oscillations, while behind the trailing edge the decay of the envelope is monotonic. Then, we present the general arguments showing that this is the case for the anapole excited in any classical system. Next, we introduce a simple, exactly integrable yet accurate, physically transparent model describing the dynamics of the anapole. The model admits generalization to a broad class of resonant phenomena and may be regarded as a compliment to the commonly used Temporal Coupled-Mode Theory.

Enhancement of electric and magnetic dipole transition of rare-earth-doped thin films tailored by high-index dielectric nanostructures

We propose a simple experimental technique to separately map the emission from electric and magnetic dipole transitions close to single dielectric nanostructures, using a few-nanometer thin film of rare-earth-ion-doped clusters. Rare-earth ions provide electric and magnetic dipole transitions of similar magnitude. By recording the photoluminescence from the deposited layer excited by a focused laser beam, we are able to simultaneously map the electric and magnetic emission enhancement on individual nanostructures. In spite of being a diffraction-limited far-field method with a spatial resolution of a few hundred nanometers, our approach appeals by its simplicity and high signal-to-noise ratio. We demonstrate our technique at the example of single silicon nanorods and dimers, in which we find a significant separation of electric and magnetic near-field contributions. Our method paves the way towards the efficient and rapid characterization of the electric and magnetic optical response of complex photonic nanostructures.

Ab initio computational analysis of spectral properties of dielectric spheroidal resonators interacting with a subwavelength nanoparticle

An efficient numerical method for determining the spectral characteristics and spatial distribution of the field of a spheroidal whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) resonator interacting with a dielectric nanoparticle is presented. The developed approach is based on a combination of T-matrix formalism applied to a single resonator with a dipole approximation for the field of the nanoparticle. The method is illustrated by computation of the scattered field of the resonator-particle system illuminated by an incident field in the form of a single WGM mode of TE or TM polarization mimicking the excitation of the resonances by a tapered fiber. Our calculations show that even a very small (less than 0.1%) deviation of the resonator's shape from an ideal sphere renders spherical approximation invalid. They also confirm that analytical resonant approximation for spheroidal resonators developed previously gives a reasonable qualitative description of the spectral characteristics of the resonator-particle system. It was found, however, that corrections to the resonant approximation are significant enough for realistic nominally spherical resonators to be taken into account for accurate analysis of the experimental data.

Surface mode with large field enhancement in dielectric-dimer-on-mirror structures

Plasmonic nanostructures with accessible and strongly enhanced fields are useful for a variety of applications related to surface-enhanced light-matter interaction. We describe a method to migrate localized fields from a metal to dielectric surface. By arranging low-index contrast dielectric dimers on an optically thick metal film, a narrow-linewidth resonant mode is formed through diffraction coupling, with accessible enhancement away from a metal surface. The enhancement in the electric field intensity is over 2000 by dielectric dimers with a 100 nm gap and 720 nm period, and the resonant linewidth is about 0.35 nm around the wavelength of 725 nm. The dispersion of this periodic structure allows resonant enhancement of not only emission but also excitation. The design principle provides a means to tune the narrow-linewidth resonance over a wide wavelength range from ultraviolet to near-infrared.

Indium phosphide metasurface with enhanced nonlinear absorption

We solve the nonlinear Maxwell equations in an InP-based dielectric metamaterial, considering both two-photon absorption and photo-induced free-carrier absorption. We obtain the intensity-dependent reflection, absorption, and effective permittivity and permeability of the metamaterial. Our results show that nonlinear absorption dampens both the electric and magnetic Mie resonance, although the magnetic resonance is more affected because it occurs at longer wavelengths where the free-carrier absorption cross section is larger. Owing to field concentration in the metamaterial at resonance, the threshold intensity for nonlinear absorption is reduced by a factor of about 30 compared to a homogeneous layer of the same thickness. Our results have implications on the use of dielectric metamaterials for nonlinear applications such as higher harmonic generation, optical limiting, and ultrafast modulation.