Superabsorption of light by nanoparticles

Konstantin Ladutenko*, Pavel Belov, Ovidio Peña-Rodríguez, Ali Mirzaei, Andrey E. Miroshnichenko, Ilya V. Shadrivov

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    19 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Nanoparticles have a fundamental limit as to how much light they can absorb. This limit is based on the finite number of modes excited in the nanoparticle at a given wavelength and maximum absorption capacity per mode. The enhanced absorption can be achieved when each mode supported by the nanoparticle absorbs light up to the maximum capacity. Using a stochastic optimization algorithm, we design multilayer nanoparticles, in which we can make several resonant modes overlap at the same frequency resulting in superabsorption. We further introduce the efficiency of the absorption for a nanoparticle, which is the absorption normalized by the physical size of the particle, and show that efficient absorbers do not always operate in the superabsorption regime.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)18897-18901
    Number of pages5
    JournalNanoscale
    Volume7
    Issue number45
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 7 Dec 2015

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