Perfect absorption of a focused light beam by a single nanoparticle

Absorption of electromagnetic energy by a dissipative material is one of the most fundamental electromagnetic processes that underlies a plethora of applied problems, including sensing and molecular detection, radar detection, wireless power transfer, and photovoltaics. Perfect absorption is a parti...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2020-03
Main Authors: Proskurin, Alexey, Bogdanov, Andrey, Baranov, Denis G
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Absorption
Dipoles
Light beams
Mathematical analysis
Nanoparticles
Photovoltaic cells
Planar structures
Plane waves
Radar detection
Scattering
Substrates
Wireless power transmission
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Summary:Absorption of electromagnetic energy by a dissipative material is one of the most fundamental electromagnetic processes that underlies a plethora of applied problems, including sensing and molecular detection, radar detection, wireless power transfer, and photovoltaics. Perfect absorption is a particular regime when all of the incoming electromagnetic energy is absorbed by the system without scattering. Commonly, the incident energy is delivered to the absorbing system by a plane wave, hence perfect absorption of this wave requires an infinitely extended planar structure. Here, we demonstrate theoretically that a confined incident beam carrying a finite amount of electromagnetic energy can be perfectly absorbed by a finite size deep subwavelength scatterer on a substrate. We analytically solve the self-consistent scattering problem in the dipole approximation and find a closed-form expression for the spatial spectrum of the incident field and the required complex polarizability of the particle. All analytical predictions are confirmed with full-wave simulations.
ISSN:2331-8422