Generation of Photonic Hooks under Point-Source Illumination from Patchy Microcylinders

Abstract

Photonic hook (PH) is a new type of non-evanescent light beam with subwavelength curved structures. It has shown promising applications in super-resolution imaging and has the potential to be used in micromachining, optical trapping, etc. PHs are generally produced by illuminating mesoscale asymmetric particles with optical plane waves. In this work, we used the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method to investigate the PH phenomenon under point-source illumination. We found that the PHs can be effectively generated from point-source illuminated patchy particles. By changing the background refractive index, particle diameters and the position and coverage ratio of Ag patches, the characteristics of the PHs can be effectively tuned. Moreover, the structure of the intensity distribution of the light field generated from small and large particles can have an opposite bending direction due to the near-field light-matter interaction.