FOM veldhoven

My work is accepted by FOM veldhoven 2017 as an oral presentation and I will talk about our paper on "Excitation of the radiationless anapole mode";

nice review on the current "meta-lens" researches

"Meta-lens" researches has drawn lots of attentions in recently years. With many contributions from groups with nanotechnology backgrounds, meta-lens are realized by creating a focusing wavefront using structured surfaces like plasmonic structures and high index dielectric structures. However, compared to the overwhelming attentions it got, the drawbacks of such meta-lens from optics perspective are greatly overlooked, similar to the fact that the losses of plasmonic structures are neglected in many publications which produce lots of highly cited papers and create a "closed" subfield of physics but not many real applications comes out.
Finally a nice and critical review is given by diffraction optics experts  P. Lalanne and P. Chavel on the current "Meta-lens" researches.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1610/1610.02507.pdf

New publication on excitation of the radiationless anapole

My paper on the excitation of the radiationless anapole is just published online in OSA's new open access journal Optica:

Excitation of the radiationless anapole mode
I've made a video recently on this topic for our group website:

new publication on stretchable Fresnel zone plate

Xueming's paper on a stretchable Fresnel zone plate composed of CNT grown on PDMS, in which I performed the simulation and optical measurement,  is published on Scientific Reports:
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep25348
Achieving circularly symmetric stretching is rather difficult task, which results in strong astigmatism aberrations after stretching. But it is a very good idea. If we could have found an ideal circular stretching mechanism, it will be much better, #the power of mechanical engineering:).

New publication on focal field shaping of vector vortex beams

Our publication "Shaping the focal field of radially/azimuthally polarized phase vortex with Zernike polynomials" is published recently on Journal of Optics.: 
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2040-8978/18/6/065608

Krylov model-order reduction approach paper online

Joern's paper is online now. This paper is on the calculation of spontaneous decay rate of resonance in open system with a Krylov model-order reduction approach. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00339-016-9643-4 This paper will be very interesting for those who deals with resonances of open systems, like plasmonic particles. The proposed approach can calculate all the scattering poles at one time and the corresponding modes. The method is different but deals with similar physical problems like previously Philippe Lalanne's quasi-normal mode analysis(PRL paper, reference to be added later). Lei

New publication provide an alternative view about the Kerker's condition for directional scattering

Broadband active tuning of unidirectional scattering from nanoantenna using combined radially and azimuthally polarized beams . Traditional Kerker's condition deals with linearly plane wave illumination, where a single wavelength can fulfill this condition on direction forward/backward scattering, thus very narrow-band. Our proposed scheme is based on separate control over the induced electric dipole and induced magnetic dipole using two coherent focused beams of radial polarization and azimuthal polarization, respectively. By carefully tuning the amplitude and phase relation of the two beams, a broadband unidirectional scattering can be achieved, even at the antenna’s resonant wavelength where the antenna scatters efficiently. By moving the focus of one beam, a drastic switch of the unidirectional scattering can be observed. Such a scheme enables the design of ultra-compact optical switches and directional couplers based on nanoantennas. PS. More detailed discussion will be added when I have more time. Lei