Broadband unidirectional scattering by magneto-electric core-shell nanoparticles

Core-shell nanoparticles have attracted surging interests due to their flexibly tunable resonances and various applications in medical diagnostics, biosensing, nanolasers, and many other fields. The core-shell nanoparticles can support simultaneously both electric and magnetic resonances, and when the resonances are properly engineered, entirely new properties can be achieved. Here we study core-shell nanoparticles that support both electric and artificial magnetic dipolar modes, which are engineered to coincide spectrally with the same strength. We reveal that the interferences of these two resonances result in azimuthally symmetric unidirectional scattering, which can be further improved by arranging the nanoparticles in a chain, with both azimuthal symmetry and vanishing backward scattering preserved over a wide spectral range. We also demonstrate that the vanishing backward scattering is preserved, even for random particle distributions, which can find applications in the fields of nanoantennas, photovoltaic devices, and nanoscale lasers that require backward scattering suppressions.