Ultra-directional super-scattering of homogenous spherical particles with radial anisotropy

We study the light scattering of homogenous radially-anisotropic spherical particles. It is shown that radial anisotropy can be employed to tune effectively the electric resonances, and thus enable flexible overlapping of electric and magnetic dipoles of various numbers, which leads to unidirectional forward super-scattering at different spectral positions. We further reveal that through adjusting the radial anisotropy parameters, electric and magnetic resonances of higher orders can be also made overlapped, thus further collimating the forward scattering lobes. The ultra-directional super-scattering we have obtained with individual homogenous radially anisotropic spherical particles may shed new light to the design of compact and efficient nanoantennas, which may find various applications in solar cells, bio-sensing and many other antenna based researches. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America