Spherically symmetric inhomogeneous bianisotropic media: Wave propagation and light scattering

We develop a technique for finding closed-form expressions for electromagnetic fields in radially inhomogeneous bianisotropic media, both the solutions of the Maxwell equations and material tensors being defined by the set of auxiliary two-dimensional matrices. The approach is applied to determine the scattering cross-sections by spherical particles, the fields inside which correspond to the Airy-exponential waves

Optical Pulling and Pushing Forces via Bloch Surface Waves

Versatile manipulation of nano- and microobjects underlies the optomechanics and a variety of its applications in biology, medicine, and lab-on-a-chip platforms. For flexible tailoring optical forces, as well as for extraordinary optomechanical effects, additional degrees of freedom should be introduced into the system. Here, we demonstrate that photonic crystals provide a flexible platform for nanoparticles optical manipulation due to both Bloch surface waves (BSWs) and the complex character of the reflection coefficient paving a way for complex optomechanical interactions control. We demonstrate that appearance of enhanced pulling and pushing transversal optical forces acting on a single bead placed above a one-dimensional photonic crystal due to directional excitation of Bloch surface wave at the photonic crystal interface. Our theoretical results, which are supported with numerical simulations, demonstrate angle or wavelength assisted switching between BSW-induced optical pulling and pushing forces. Easy-to-fabricate for any desired spectral range photonic crystals are shown to be prospective for precise optical sorting of nanoparticles, especially for core-shell nanoparticles, which are difficult to sort with conventional optomechanical methods. Our approach opens opportunities for novel optical manipulation schemes and platforms and enhanced light-matter interaction in optical trapping setups

Scattering Suppression from Arbitrary Objects in Spatially-Dispersive Layered Metamaterials

Concealing objects by making them invisible to an external electromagnetic probe is coined by the term cloaking. Cloaking devices, having numerous potential applications, are still face challenges in realization, especially in the visible spectral range. In particular, inherent losses and extreme parameters of metamaterials required for the cloak implementation are the limiting factors. Here, we numerically demonstrate nearly perfect suppression of scattering from arbitrary shaped objects in spatially dispersive metamaterial acting as an alignment-free concealing cover. We consider a realization of a metamaterial as a metal-dielectric multilayer and demonstrate suppression of scattering from an arbitrary object in forward and backward directions with perfectly preserved wavefronts and less than 10% absolute intensity change, despite spatial dispersion effects present in the composite metamaterial. Beyond the usual scattering suppression applications, the proposed configuration may serve as a simple realisation of scattering-free detectors and sensors

Invisibility and perfect absorption of all-dielectric metasurfaces originated from the transverse Kerker effect

Dielectric metasurfaces perform unique photonics effects and serve as the engine of nowadays light-matter technologies. Here, we suggest theoretically and demonstrate experimentally the realization of a high transparency effect in a novel type of all-dielectric metasurface, where each constituting meta-atom of the lattice presents the so-called transverse Kerker effect. In contrast to Huygens' metasurfaces, both phase and amplitude of the incoming wave remain unperturbed at the resonant frequency and, consequently, our metasurface totally operates in the invisibility regime. We prove experimentally, for the microwave frequency range, that both phase and amplitude of the transmitted wave from the metasurface remain almost unaffected. Finally, we demonstrate both numerically and experimentally and explain theoretically in detail a novel mechanism to achieve perfect absorption of the incident light enabled by the resonant response of the dielectric metasurfaces placed in the vicinity of a conducting substrate. In the subdiffractive limit, we show the aforementioned effects are mainly determined by the optical response of the constituting meta-atoms rather than the collective lattice contributions. With the spectrum scalability, our findings can be incorporated in engineering devices for energy harvesting, nonlinear phenomena and filters applications.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure

Magnetic field concentration with coaxial silicon nanocylinders in the optical spectral range

Resonant magnetic energy accumulation is theoretically investigated in the optical and near-infrared regions. It is demonstrated that the silicon nanocylinders with and without coaxial through holes can be used for the control and manipulation of optical magnetic fields, providing up to 26-fold enhancement of these fields for the considered system. Magnetic field distributions and dependence on the parameters of nanocylinders are revealed at the wavelengths of magnetic dipole and quadrupole resonances responsible for the enhancement. The obtained results can be applied, for example, to designing nanoantennas for the detection of atoms with magnetic optical transitions

Magnetoelectric Exceptional Points in Isolated All-Dielectric Nanoparticles

We consider the scattering of electromagnetic waves by non-spherical dielectric resonators and reveal that it can be linked to the exceptional points underpinned by the physics of non-Hermitian systems. We demonstrate how symmetry breaking in the shape of an isolated dielectric nanoparticle can be associated with the existence of an exceptional point in the eigenvalue spectrum and formulate the general conditions for the strong coupling of resonances, illustrating them for the example of the electric dipole and magnetic dipole modes supported by a silicon nanoparticle. We argue that any two modes of a dielectric nanoparticle can lead to an exceptional point provided their resonant frequencies cross as a function of a tuning parameter, such as, e.g. its aspect ratio, and their field distributions should have opposite signs after a reflection in the transverse plane of the structure. The coupled modes radiate as a mixture of electric and magnetic dipoles, which result in a strong magnetoelectric response, being easily controlled by the symmetry breaking perturbation. We also investigate the influence of a dielectric substrate, demonstrating how the latter provides an additional mechanism to tune the position of exceptional points in the parameter space. Finally, we discuss applications of magnetoelectric exceptional points for refractive index sensing