Experimental verification of the concept of all-dielectric nanoantennas

Being motivated by the recent theoretical proposal of nanoantennas based on high-permittivity dielectric spheres [A. E. Krasnok et al., JETP Lett. 94, 22113 (2011)], we suggest and verify experimentally the concept of all-dielectric antennas in the microwave frequency range. In addition to the electric resonance, each sphere exhibits a very strong magnetic resonance, resulting in a narrow radiation pattern and overall high directivity of such antennas. We find an excellent agreement between the experimental data and numerical results and verify directly high-performance characteristics of such all-dielectric antennas potentially scalable to the nanoscale and operation at the optical frequency range. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4719209]