Highly confined photonic nanojet from elliptical particles

Abstract

Elliptically shaped particles with different size and refractive indices have been studied under plane wave illumination using simulation tools such as 2D-FDTD, 2D-MMP, and 3D-MMP. Owing to careful manipulation, the power distribution in the vicinity of the particles opposite boundary resulted in a tightly focused photonic nanojet. Their waists are significantly smaller than the diffraction limit while propagating over several optical wavelengths without significant divergence. In this paper, we report on the manipulation of the particles elliptical shapes and the underlying refractive indices with respect to a maximally confined power distribution in the resulting nanojet which has been parameterized according to both, the beam waist and the beam divergence. The result that elliptical particles (i.e. oblate spheroids) turned out to be superior to spherical ones was underpinned within a highly accurate and fast 3D-MMP simulation using ring multipoles.

Keywords:

• FDTD method
• MMP method
• photonic nanojet
• scattering