Anapole: Its birth, life, and death

Despite the recent extensive study of the nonradiating (anapole) mode in the resonant light scattering by nanoparticles, the key questions, about the dynamics of its excitation at the leading front of the incident pulse and collapse behind the trailing edge, still remain open. We answer the questions, first, by direct numerical integration of the complete set of the Maxwell equations, describing the scattering of a rectangular laser pulse by a dielectric cylinder. The simulation shows that while the excitation and the collapse periods, both have the same characteristic time-scale, the dynamics of these processes are qualitatively different. The relaxation to the steady-state scattering at the leading front is accompanied by high-amplitude oscillatory modulations of the envelope of the basic electromagnetic oscillations, while behind the trailing edge the decay of the envelope is monotonic. Then, we present the general arguments showing that this is the case for the anapole excited in any classical system. Next, we introduce a simple, exactly integrable yet accurate, physically transparent model describing the dynamics of the anapole. The model admits generalization to a broad class of resonant phenomena and may be regarded as a compliment to the commonly used Temporal Coupled-Mode Theory.