We report the optical response of dielectric sub-micrometer particle dimers with resonances in the visible, illustrating a hybridization of electric and magnetic dipolar modes of their individual constituents. The experimental results, corroborated by the numerical calculations, reveal the contributions to the scattering from homogeneous pairs of dipolar electric-electric and magnetic-magnetic modes, as well as from the heterogeneous electric-magnetic modes, induced due to the overlap between the electric and magnetic polarizabilities of single scatterers. The silicon nanoparticles are fabricated on glass by a laser printing method and characterized by polarization-resolved dark-field microscopy. Extensive numerical calculations are carried out to investigate the influence of the morphology and oxidation of the dimers on the optical response in order to properly model their hybridization.

The authors acknowledge financial support of this work from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (SFB/TRR 123 “PlanOS”). M.K.S. and J.A. acknowledge funding from the project FIS2013-41184-P of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, the ETORTEK IE14-393 NANOGUNE’14 project of the Department of Industry of the Government of the Basque Country, project IT756-13 of the Department of Education and Culture of the Basque Country, and scholarship AP-2012-4204 from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport. A.B.E. and B.N.C. acknowledge support from the Ministry of Education and Science of Russian Federation (project 14.B25.31.0019).

Peer Reviewed