Optical modes in linear arrays of dielectric spherical particles: a numerical investigation

Abstract

We have investigated bound modes in finite linear chains of dielectric particles of various lengths, interparticle spacing and particle materials. Through a unique application of the multisphere Mie scattering formalism, we have developed numerical methods to calculate eigen-optical modes for various arrays of particles. These numerical methods involve the use of the multisphere scattering formalism as the entries in N×N matrices where N represents the number of particles in the chain. Eigenmodes of these matrices correspond to the eigen-optical modes of interest. We identified the eigenmodes with the highest quality factor by the application of a modified version of the Newton-Raphson algorithm. We found that convergence is strong using this algorithm for linear chains of up to several hundreds of particles. By comparing the dipolar approach with the more complex approach which utilizes a combination of both dipolar and quadrupolar approaches, we demonstrated that the dipolar approach has an accuracy of approximately 99%. We found that the quality factor Q of the mode increases with the cubed value of the number of particles in chain in agreement with the previously developed theory, the effects of disordering of particle sizes and inter-particle distances will be discussed.