Abstract
Understanding of light-passive materials interaction is a hot subject related to a variety of applications from metamaterials, metasurfaces, plasmonic laser cavity, and surface plasmonic polarity. The physics insight and proposed applications attract much attention, because it could be believed to overcome diffraction limit, which is fundamentally constrained to biological imaging and enhancing molecule signal. Although the theory of light scattering was established over the past century by Gustav Mie,it is interesting to adopt different viewpoint of physics to comprehend this old theory. Now, theoretical physicist have found that for passive system, one can have coherent perfection absorption, invisible objects based on cancellation method, and superscattering cavity. This thesis discusses the fundamental scattering limit by passive objects, in order to explore possible scattering states and physical bounds. Compared to spherical symmetrically object, in cylindrical system it only has an azimuth symmetry to exciting field. As a result, it has different field response to different field polarization. This study wants to understand this intrinsic characteristic to recognize its picture, i.e., phase diagram. The first part of this thesis develops a theory of light scattering in cylindrical systems based on Maxwell equations. The second part, we plot the phase diagram due to power conservation and discuss the meaning and properties of diagram. The third part, we display how to use the diagram to design functional devices, such as 1. directional emission, 2. superabsorbers, 3. manipulation of intrinsic light scattering by two counter-waves.