It is well known that electromagnetic radiation propagates along a straight line, but this common sense was broken by the artificial curved light—the Airy beam. In this Letter, we demonstrate a new type of curved light beam besides the Airy beam, the so-called “photonic hook.” This photonic hook is a curved high-intensity focus by a dielectric trapezoid particle illuminated by a plane wave. The difference between the phase velocity and the interference of the waves inside the particle causes the phenomenon of focus bending.

In this letter, we reported the experimental observation of a photonic hook (PH)—a type of near-field curved light generated at the output of a dielectric cuboid, featuring a broken symmetry and dimensions comparable to the electromagnetic (EM) wavelength. Given that the specific value of the wavelength is not critical once the mesoscale conditions for the particle are met, we verified these predictions experimentally using a 0.25 THz continuous-wave source. The radius of curvature associated with the PH-generated is smaller than the wavelength, while its minimum beam-waist is about 0.44λ. This represents the smallest radius of curvature ever recorded for any EM beam. The observed phenomenon is of potential interest in optics and photonics, particularly, in super-resolution microscopy, manipulation of particles and liquids, photolithography, and material processing. Finally, it has a universal character and should be inherent to acoustic and surface waves, electrons, neutrons, protons, and other beams interacting with asymmetric mesoscale obstacles.

We designed a novel cylindrical metalens assembled by hexagonally arranged close-contact nanofibers. A near-field focusing nanojet with a full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) waist, 26.7% smaller than the Abbe diffraction limit for 532 nm wavelength light, is observed at the bottom of a 1600 nm diameter cylindrical metalens assembled by 160 nm diameter nanofibers irradiated by a plane wave from the top. Using differently sized nanofibers as building blocks to assemble the metalens, the waist size of the produced photonic nanojet in the near-field zone and the lateral resolution of the focus can be flexibly adjusted, simultaneously breaking the diffraction limit.

The Poynting vector plays a key role in electrodynamics as it is directly related to the power and the momentum carried by an electromagnetic wave. Based on the Lorenz-Mie theory, we report on the focusing effect of a spherical particle-lens by properly analysing the Poynting vector maps. Conventional two-dimensional (2D) maps showing Poynting vector magnitude and direction in a given plane cannot deliver information on three-dimensional (3D) directivity and vectorisation in key regions of singularities, such as vortexes and saddle points, due to poor expressiveness. In this article, an analytical 3D mapping technology is utilised to track the field-features passing through the singularities of the distribution of the Poynting vector in a spherically dielectric mesoscale particle-lens. We discovered that the spheres with the certain size parameters can stimulate extremely large field-intensity at singularities and then form two circular hotspots around the sphere poles. An astonishing large ‘heart-shape’ 3D Poynting vector circulation, which cannot be predicted by conventional 2D mapping analysis, is found to provide a great angular variation within an enormous range in these spheres. We anticipate that this effect will contribute to the field-enhancement phenomena, such as surface enhances Raman scattering, surface enhances absorption, super-resolution imaging and others.

Photonic nanojets can be created via plane wave irradiation of multi-shaped mesoscale dielectric particles, and a waist of full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) smaller than the diffraction limit can be achieved in this process. In this paper, photonic nanojet produced by a pupil-masked 3D dielectric cuboid lens is numerically investigated under the irradiation of 532 nm wavelength plane wave. It is found that a pupil-masked cuboid lens is not only able to produce photonic nanojets with shorter FWHMs, but also increase its maximal intensity at certain masking ratios on the receiving surface. This phenomenon is different from the result of the spherical-lens reported in previous publications, and is attributed to the convergence of power flow and near-field numerical aperture (NA) increase after analysis of simulated power flow diagrams.