This paper reviews the substantial body of literature emerging since 2004 concerning photonic nanojets. The photonic nanojet is a narrow, high-intensity, non-evanescent light beam that can propagate over a distance longer than the wavelength λ after emerging from the shadow-side surface of an illuminated lossless dielectric microcylinder or microsphere of diameter larger than λ. The nanojet’s minimum beamwidth can be smaller than the classical diffraction limit, in fact as small as ~λ/3 for microspheres. It is a nonresonant phenomenon appearing for a wide range of diameters of the microcylinder or microsphere if the refractive index contrast relative to the background is less than about 2:1. Importantly, inserting within a nanojet a nanoparticle of diameter dν perturbs the far-field backscattered power of the illuminated microsphere by an amount that varies as dν3 for a fixed λ. This perturbation is much slower than the dν6 dependence of Rayleigh scattering for the same nanoparticle, if isolated. This leads to a situation where, for example, the measured far-field backscattered power of a 3-μm diameter microsphere could double if a 30-nm diameter nanoparticle were inserted into the nanojet emerging from the microsphere, despite the nanoparticle having only 1/10,000th the cross-section area of the microsphere. In effect, the nanojet serves to project the presence of the nanoparticle to the far field. These properties combine to afford potentially important applications of photonic nanojets for detecting and manipulating nanoscale objects, subdiffraction-resolution nanopatterning and nanolithography, low-loss waveguiding, and ultrahigh-density optical storage.

A novel geometric-electrostatic docking algorithm is presented, which tests and quantifies the electrostatic complementarity of the molecular surfaces together with the shape complementarity. We represent each molecule to be docked as a grid of complex numbers, storing information regarding the shape of the molecule in the real part and information regarding the electrostatic character of the molecule in the imaginary part. The electrostatic descriptors are derived from the electrostatic potential of the molecule. Thus, the electrostatic character of the molecule is represented as patches of positive, neutral, or negative values. The potential for each molecule is calculated only once and stored as potential spheres adequate for exhaustive rotation/translation scans. The geometric-electrostatic docking algorithm is applied to 17 systems, starting form the structures of the unbound molecules. The results-in terms of the complementarity scores of the nearly correct solutions, their ranking in the lists of sorted solutions, and their statistical uniqueness-are compared with those of geometric docking, showing that the inclusion of electrostatic complementarity in docking is very important, in particular in docking of unbound structures. Based on our results, we formulate several "good electrostatic docking rules": The geometric-electrostatic docking procedure is more successful than geometric docking when the potential patches are large and when the potential extends away from the molecular surface and protrudes into the solvent. In contrast, geometric docking is recommended when the electrostatic potential around the molecules to be docked appears homogenous, that is, with a similar sign all around the molecule.

We theoretically investigate light scattering from a bi-sphere system consisting of a gold nanosphere and a lossless dielectric microsphere illuminated at a resonant optical wavelength of the microsphere. Using generalized multisphere Mie theory, we find that a gold nanosphere 100 times smaller than the dielectric microsphere can be detected with a subdiffraction resolution as fine as one-third wavelength in the background medium when the microsphere is illuminated at a Mie resonance. Otherwise, off-resonance, the spatial resolution reverts to that of the nonresonant nanojet, approximately one-half wavelength in the background medium. An important potential biophotonics application is the detection of antibody-conjugated gold nanoparticles attached to the membranes of living cells in an aqueous environment.

The authors report experimental confirmation of backscattering enhancement induced by a photonic jet emerging from a dielectric sphere, a phenomenon recently predicted by theoretical solutions of Maxwell’s equations. To permit relatively straightforward laboratory measurements at microwave frequencies rather than visible light, they appropriately scaled the original conceptual dimensions of the dielectric microsphere and its adjacent perturbing nanoparticle (located within the microsphere’s photonic jet). Their experiments verified the existence of enhanced position-dependent backscattering perturbations by the adjacent particle. Their measured backscattering perturbations agreed well with prior theory and with additional finite-difference time-domain computational models of the complete microwave test geometry.

We report a means to detect deeply subwavelength pits in optical data-storage media by employing the recently observed giant backscattering perturbation phenomenon of the photonic jet. We conducted microwave experiments with dimensionally scaled-up pits and lands in a simulated optical data-storage device. These measurements were backed up by three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain computational solutions of Maxwell's equations. Results indicate that pits having a lateral area of 0.025 square wavelengths, i.e., much smaller than current BluRay™ device features, can be robustly detected with a contrast ratio approximately 28 dB greater than that provided by a lens system.