Nonlinear Modal Reduction for Subwavelength Dielectric Scattering

Abstract

We study three-dimensional wave scattering by high-index dielectric resonators with Kerr-type nonlinearity under plane-wave incidence, together with the associated nonlinear dielectric scattering resonances, through a nonlinear Lippmann-Schwinger equation. Using a Lyapunov-Schmidt reduction near a simple eigenmode of the Newtonian potential, we obtain a local decomposition of the scattered wave into a resonant contribution and a controlled remainder and derive an explicit nonlinear equation for the resonant modal coefficient for sufficiently small contrast parameter and locally small resonant amplitude and incident field. A second reduction covers the regime of incident fields of order one and weak nonlinearity. Our results extend for the first time the linear modal decomposition to nonlinear wave-scattering problems. We complement them by developing a numerical framework based on Nyström discretization, real Newton iteration, and pseudo-arclength continuation. For single resonators of several geometries, our computations confirm the predicted high-contrast resonance scaling and the nonlinear modal approximation, and exhibit the multivalued incident-wave response. For a mirror-symmetric resonator dimer, we track symmetric, antisymmetric, and symmetry-broken resonance branches over a broad range of separations. Our computations show that the symmetry-breaking threshold increases as the gap between the resonators decreases, in agreement with the leading-order bifurcation theory.

32 pages, 17 figures