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Optically resonant dielectric nanostructures represent a new and rapidly developing research direction in nanophotonics [1]. They show plenty of useful functionalities and can complement or even substitute resonant plasmonic nanoparticles for many potential application directions. The main advantages over conventional plasmonics are low losses, wide range of applicable dielectric materials and strong magnetic resonant response. In particular, the last feature opens a broad range of opportunities to control light scattering, transmission, reflection and phase characteristics through designed interference between electric and magnetic resonant modes. This has already led to demonstrations of low-loss dielectric Huygens’ metasurfaces operating with very high efficiencies in transmission mode and generalized Brewster effect showing unconventional behaviour of dielectric metasurface in reflection mode [1]. In this presentation, we will review recent magnetic resonant phenomena obtained with high-index dielectric nanoantennas and metasurfaces and show how this might lead to new functionalities, which cannot be achieved neither with conventional metasurface approaches nor with conventional bulk optics. In particular, we demonstrate how the resonance interference effect can be used to control energy distribution between diffraction orders in a nanoantenna array, which leads to light bending at very high angles of >82 degrees with efficiency >50%. This property is used to design and experimentally demonstrate flat lenses having a free-space numerical aperture (NA) of >0.99, which strongly exceeds NA of existing flat lenses and bulk optics analogues. Applications of these new, ultra-high NA, flat dielectric lenses will also be discussed.
References:
1) A. I. Kuznetsov et al., “Optically resonant dielectric nanostructures”, Science 354, aag2472 (2016).
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