Critical nanofocusing of magnetic dipole moment using a closed plasmonic tip

Squeezing magnetic dipole (MD) moment into a deep subwavelegnth apex of a tapered tip has not been achieved so far owing to a specific mode volume of a MD resonance which is dependent on an operating wavelength and back reflection of nanofocused waves. We propose a novel strategy for efficient delivery and nanofocusing of optical MD at an apex of a closed resonant plasmonic tip. Due to the ultracompact area (similar to lambda(2)/900) of the nanocavity and resonances assisted by partial mirrors in a plasmonic waveguide, the enhancement factor of magnetic energy density is improved over 5 times. We expect that our scheme can help to investigate strong magnetic phenomena, including enhanced magnetic transition, artificial optical magnetism, multipole nonlinear optics, biomolecular sensing, magnetic near-field imaging, and spectroscopy. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America