We show that weakly dissipating dielectric spheres made of materials such as glass, quartz, etc. can support high order Fano resonances associated with internal Mie modes. These resonances, happening for specific values of the size parameter, yield field-intensity enhancement factors on the order of 104–107, which can be directly obtained from analytical calculations. Associated to these “super-resonances”, we analyze the emergence of magnetic nanojets with giant magnetic fields, which might be attractive for many photonic applications.

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.

It was recently discovered that transparent microspheres and cylinders can function as a super-resolution lens (i.e., superlens) to focus light beyond the diffraction limit. A number of high-resolution applications based on these lenses have been successfully demonstrated and span nanoscopy, imaging, and spectroscopy. Fabrication of these superlenses, however, is often complex and requires sophisticated engineering processes. Clearly an easier model candidate, such as a naturally occurring superlens, is highly desirable. Here, we report for the first time a biological superlens provided by nature: the minor ampullate spider silk spun from the Nephila spider. This natural biosuperlens can distinctly resolve 100 nm features under a conventional white-light microscope with peak wavelength at 600 nm, attaining a resolution of λ/6 that is well beyond the classical limit. Thus, our work opens a new door to develop biology-based optical systems that may provide a new solution to integrating optics in biological systems.

A Teflon (polytetrafluoroethylene) sphere can be used as a focusing lens in the applications of imaging and sensing due to its low-loss property in the terahertz band. Herein, field intensities and focusing parameters are analytically calculated for Teflon spheres at different low-loss levels and then a super-enhancement focusing effect in the spheres with particular size parameters was discovered, which can stimulate about 4000 times stronger field intensity than that for incident radiation as well as the great potential of overcoming diffraction limit despite high sensitivity to the magnitude of Teflon loss. A subsequent analysis of scattering amplitudes proves that the strong scattering of a single-order mode in the internal electric or magnetic field is the main factor causing this phenomenon.

Photonic nanojets can be created via a 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 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 receiving surface. This phenomenon is different from the result of spherical-lens reported in previous publications, and is attributed to convergence of power flow and near-field numerical aperture (NA) increase after analysis of simulated power flow diagrams.