Revealing Quantitative Observation of Multi-Loop Super-Toroidal Currents in Plasmonic Meta-Atoms

Abstract

Living in a world of resonances, there have been significant progresses in the field of excitation high-quality and multifunctional moments across a wide range of optical frequencies. Among all acknowledged resonances, the toroidal multipoles have received copious interest in recent years due to having inherent signatures in nature. As a fundamental member, toroidal dipole is a strongly localized electromagnetic excitation based on charge-current distributions, which can be squeezed in an extremely tiny spot. Although there have been extensive studies on the behavior and properties of toroidal dipoles to develop all-optical devices based on this technology, so far, all analyses are restricted to the first (1st) order toroidal dipoles. In this work, using a simple technique, we successfully monitored supporting exquisite multi-loop super-toroidal (MLST) spectral features in a planar multipixel plasmonic meta-atom. We quantitatively demonstrate that how a traditional toroidal dipole can be switched to a super-toroidal moment by varying the dielectric permittivity of the gaps between proximal pixels. This understanding paves new approaches for the excitation of complex multi-loop toroidal moments in plasmonic metamaterials with high sensitivity, applicable for various practical applications.