Bound States in the Continuum Excited and Detected in the Near-Field

Bound states in the Continuum (BICs) represent a new paradigm for resonant photonics due to their infinite lifetimes associated with the full suppression of radiation losses. This property makes it impossible to directly investigate BICs with standard far-field spectroscopy. In this contribution, we demonstrate the local excitation and the direct measurement of the near-field of BICs in arrays of dimer resonators and report their extremely long lifetimes due to the out-of-phase field oscillations in the resonators.