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.