Photonic hook: a new sub-wavelength-scale selfbending light beam

Abstract

In the past few years, it has shown that photonic jet – a high-intensity near-field focus can be curved through focusing of an asymmetric mesoscale dielectric particle. This unique electromagnetic beam configuration breaking spatial symmetry was termed ‘photonic hooks’ and demonstrated different features from Airy-family beams using a relatively simple experimental setup. The measured radius of the photonic curvature it creates approximates to half of the wavelength, which is the smallest curvature of electromagnetic wave ever reported. This effect was discovered in many relevant fields, including near-field optics (both in transmitted and reflection modes), terahertz (THz) radiation, in-plane plasmonics, and acoustics, and this paper is a short review for them.