Optomechanical Kerker effect

Abstract

Tunable directional scattering is of paramount importance for operation of antennas, routing of light, and design of topologically protected optical states. For visible light scattered on a nanoparticle the directionality could be provided by the Kerker effect, exploiting the interference of electric and magnetic dipole emission patterns. However, magnetic optical resonances in small sub-100-nm particles are relativistically weak. Here, we predict inelastic scattering with the unexpectedly strong tunable directivity up to 5.25 driven by a trembling of small particle without any magnetic resonance. The proposed optomechanical Kerker effect originates from the vibration-induced multipole conversion. We also put forward an optomechanical spin Hall effect, the inelastic polarization-dependent directional scattering. Our results uncover an intrinsically multipolar nature of the interaction between light and mechanical motion. They apply to a variety of systems from cold atoms to two-dimensional materials to superconducting qubits and can be instructive to engineer chiral optomechanical coupling.