Selective excitation and enhancement of multipolar resonances in dielectric nanospheres using cylindrical vector beams

Abstract

Resonant excitation and manipulation of complex interactions among two or more resonances in high-index dielectric nanostructures provide great opportunities for engineering novel optical phenomena and applications. However, difficulties often arise when interpreting the observed spectra because of the overlap of the broad resonances contributed by many factors such as particle size, shape, and background index. Therefore, selective excitation of resonances that spectrally overlap with each other provides a gateway towards an improved understanding of the complex interactions. Here, we demonstrate selective excitation and enhancement of multipolar resonances of silicon nanospheres using cylindrical vector beams (CVBs) with different diameters of nanospheres and numerical apertures (NAs) of the excitations. By combining single particle spectroscopy and electrodynamic simulations, we show that the radially polarized beam can selectively excite the electric multipoles, whereas the azimuthally polarized beam can selectively excite the magnetic multipoles even though multipolar resonances are convoluted together due to their spectral overlap. Moreover, focusing the CVBs with high NA can lead to a dominant longitudinal polarization of the electric or magnetic field. We show that the enhanced longitudinal polarization with increasing NA of the radially and azimuthally polarized beams can selectively enhance the electric and magnetic multipolar resonances, respectively. Our approach can be used as a spectroscopy tool to enhance and identify multipolar resonances leading to a better understanding of light-matter interactions in other dielectric nanostructures as well as serve as a first step toward excitation of dark mode and Fano resonances in dielectric oligomers by breaking the symmetry of the nanostructures.