Bistable scattering of nano-silicon for super-linear super-resolution imaging

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates low-Q silicon Mie resonators exhibiting optical bistability at nanoscale volumes, enabling super-linear emission-excitation dependence that significantly enhances optical resolution, advancing nanoscale photonics and inspection technologies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel nanoscale silicon Mie resonator with record-low Q-factor exhibiting bistability through photo-thermo-optical effects, enabling super-resolution imaging.

Findings

Achieved optical bistability in a 10^-3 um^3 silicon resonator with Q<10.

Demonstrated super-linear emission-excitation power dependence.

Enhanced optical resolution by more than 3 times.

Abstract

Optical bistability is fundamental for all-optical switches, but typically requires high-Q cavities with micrometer sizes. Through boosting nonlinearity with photo-thermo-optical effects, we achieve bistability in a silicon Mie resonator with a volume size of 10-3 um3 and Q-factor < 10, both are record-low. Furthermore, bistable scattering naturally leads to large super-linear emission-excitation power dependence, which we applied to enhance optical resolution by more than 3 times. Our work paves the way toward nanoscale photonics computation and label-free semiconductor nano-inspection.