Over the last decade, plasmonic antireflecting nanostructures have been extensively studied to be utilized in various optical and optoelectronic systems such as lenses, solar cells, photodetectors, and others. The growing interest to all-dielectric photonics as an alternative optical technology along with plasmonics motivates us to compare antireflective properties of plasmonic and all-dielectric nanoparticle coatings based on silver and crystalline silicon respectively. Our simulation results for spherical nanoparticles array on top of amorphous silicon show that both silicon and silver coatings demonstrate strong antireflective properties in the visible spectral range. For the first time, we show that zero reflectance from the structure with silicon coatings originates from the destructive interference of electric- and magnetic-dipole responses of nanoparticle array with the wave reflected from the substrate, and we refer to this reflection suppression as substrate-mediated Kerker effect. We theoretically compare the silicon and silver coating effectiveness for the thin-film photovoltaic applications. Silver nanoparticles can be more efficient, enabling up to 30% increase of the overall absorbance in semiconductor layer. Nevertheless, silicon coatings allow up to 64% absorbance increase in the narrow band spectral range because of the substrate-mediated Kerker effect, and band position can be effectively tuned by varying the nanoparticles sizes.

In this Letter, we demonstrate and investigate the Kerker-type effect in high-index dielectric nanoparticles for which the third-order multipoles give a considerable contribution to the light scattering process. It is shown that the Kerker-type effect (strong suppression of the backward light scattering and, simultaneously, resonant forward light scattering) can be associated with the resonant excitation of a toroidal dipole moment in the system. This effect is realized due to the interference of the scattered waves generated by electric, magnetic, and toroidal dipole moments of high-index nanoparticles.

All-dielectric nanophotonics lies at a forefront of nanoscience and technology as it allows to control light at the nanoscale using its electric and magnetic components. Bulk silicon does not experience any magnetic response, nevertheless, we demonstrate that the metasurface made of silicon parallelepipeds allows to excite the magnetic dipole moment leading to the broadening and enhancement of the absorption. Our investigations are underpinned by the numerical predictions and the experimental verifications. Also surprisingly we found that the resonant electric quadrupole moment leads to the enhancement of reflection. Our results can be applied for a development of absorption based devices from miniature dielectric absorbers, filters to solar cells and energy harvesting devices.

The bianisotropy of meta-atoms is usually associated with their nonlocal response and mutual coupling between electric and magnetic dipole moments induced by an incident field. In this Letter, we generalize the theory of bianisotropy beyond the dipole response to cases of arbitrary high-order multipole resonances. We demonstrate that bianisotropy is fully connected to the geometrical structure of meta-atoms and caused exclusively by the absence of their inversion symmetry, while the strength of the bianisotropy response grows normally with the size of a meta-atom. Applying a group theory analysis, we reveal the explicit criteria when the dipole approximation is enough for the correct description of bianisotropy and when accounting for higher-order multipoles is required. We consider a triangular prism as an illustrative example of a bianisotropic particle and show how accounting for higher-order multipoles prevents the violation of Onsager-Casimir conditions for kinetic coefficients appearing in the dipole approximation. The developed theory is an essential step toward a deeper insight into the scattering properties of nanoantennas and meta-atoms.

All-dielectric “magnetic light” nanophotonics based on high refractive index nanoparticles allows controlling magnetic component of light at nanoscale without having high dissipative losses. The artificial magnetic optical response of such nanoparticles originates from circular displacement currents excited inside those structures and strongly depends on geometry and dispersion of optical materials. Here an approach for enhancing of magnetic response via resonant bianisotropy effect is proposed and analyzed. The key mechanism of enhancement is based on electric-magnetic interaction between two electrically and magnetically resonant nanoparticles of all-dielectric dimer. It was shown that proper geometrical arrangement of the dimer in respect to the incident illumination direction allows flexible control over all vectorial components of the magnetic moment, tailoring the latter in the dynamical range of 100% and delivering enhancement up to 36% relative to performances of standalone spherical particles. The proposed approach provides pathways for designs of all-dielectric metamaterials and metasurfaces with strong magnetic responses.

Dielectric photonics platform provides unique possibilities to control light scattering via utilizing high-index dielectric nanoantennas with peculiar optical signatures. Despite the intensively growing field of all-dielectric nanophotonics, it is still unclear how surrounding media affect scattering properties of a nanoantenna with complex multipole response. Here, we report on light scattering by a silicon cubic nanoparticle embedded in lossless media, supporting optical resonant response. We show that significant changes in the scattering process are governed by the electro-magnetic multipole resonances, which experience spectral red-shift and broadening over the whole visible and near-infrared spectra as the indices of media increase. Most interestingly, the considered nanoantenna exhibits the broadband forward scattering in the visible and near-infrared spectral ranges due to the Kerker-effect in high-index media. The revealed effect of broadband forward scattering is essential for highly demanding applications in which the influence of the media is crucial such as health-care, e.g., sensing, treatment efficiency monitoring, and diagnostics. In addition, the insights from this study are expected to pave the way toward engineering the nanophotonic systems including but not limited to Huygens-metasurfaces in media within a single framework.