Generation of photonic hooks from patchy microcylinders

Abstract

The photonic hook (PH) is new type of curved light beam which has promising applications in various fields such as nanoparticle manipulation, super-resolution imaging, etc. Herein, we proposed a new approach of utilizing patchy microcylinders for the generation of PHs. Numerical simulation based on the finite-difference time-domain method was used to investigate the field distribution characteristics of the PHs. By rotating the patchy microcylinder, PHs with different curvatures can be effectively generated, and the PH with a bending angle of 28.4$^\circ$ and a full-width-half-maximum of 0.36 $\lambda$ can be obtained from 1 $\mu$m-diameter patchy microcylinders.