Optical technologies traditionally exploit electric responses in matter in order to control light.  Recently, specially engineered materials have been developed to exploit the magnetic responses for light manipulation as well.  In particular, researchers have made use of the optically-induced magnetic responses (OIMRs) generated in metallic nanostructures, such as split ring resonators, to achieve optical effects not seen in nature.  Dielectric nanostructures have recently been discovered to also support OIMRs, which can be useful for applications requiring low loss, such as wavefront control and robust nanoscale sensing.  In order to harness the OIMR in dielectric nanostructures for future applications, the fundamental understanding of dielectric nanoparticles and their resonant nature need to be developed.

In this talk, I will present my study on the OIMRs in several all-dielectric systems based on silicon nanodisks, namely single, clusters and regular arrays of nanodisks.  Furthermore, I will present two functional metadevices capable of wavefront control based on Huygens' metasurfaces which requires manipulation of the OIMR in silicon nanodisk arrays.  Finally, the interdisciplinary areas of chemical and biological sensing using silicon nanodisk arrays are explored to demonstrate the versatility of such a system.