Focused electromagnetic doughnut pulses and their interaction with interfaces and nanostructures

"The "focused doughnut", a single-cycle electromagnetic perturbation of toroidal topology with inseparable time and spatial dependencies propagates at the speed of light in vacuum, as was shown by Hellwarth and Nouchi in 1996. While normal incidence reflection and refraction of conventional electromagnetic pulses in isotropic media do not lead to polarization changes, "focused doughnut" pulses undergo complex field transformations owing to the toroidal field structure and the presence of longitudinal components. We also demonstrate that "focused doughnuts" can interact strongly with structured media exciting dominant dynamic toroidal dipoles in spherical dielectric particles."