Engineered Near and Far Field Optical Response of Dielectric Nanostuctures using Focused Cylindrical Vector Beams

TL;DR

This study investigates how the near- and far-field optical responses of silicon nanostructures can be engineered using focused cylindrical vector beams, revealing polarization-dependent resonance behaviors and providing a simulation toolkit.

Contribution

It introduces a Python toolkit for FDTD simulations of nanostructures under various polarized beams and demonstrates how shape and polarization influence optical resonances.

Findings

Shape anisotropy affects resonance wavelength and dipole orientation.

Electric dipole resonance splits depending on spheroid symmetry and polarization.

Optical responses can be tuned by polarization, shape, and dimensions.

Abstract

Near- and far-field optical properties of silicon nanostructures under linear polarization (Gaussian beam), and azimuthally or radially focused cylindrical vector beams are investigated by finite-difference time-domain method (FDTD) in Meep open-source software. A python toolkit allowing FDTD simulations in Meep for using those excitation sources is provided. In addition to the preferential excitation of specific electric or magnetic resonance modes as function of the excitation beam polarization, it is shown in the case of spheroids that shape anisotropy affects the resonance wavelength and the dipole orientation of the magnetic or electric dipole mode. For radial or linear polarization, the electric dipole resonance is split by an anapole mode depending on the spheroid symmetry axis with respect to the electric field orientation. Finally, the optical properties in both far-field (scattering pattern) and near-field (electric and magnetic field hot spots) can be tuned by changing the excitation polarization at a fixed wavelength and selecting properly the spheroid shape and dimensions. These numerical simulations can be extended to more complex shapes, or fabrication-friendly nanostructures such as nanocylinders with circular or elliptic sections.