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The Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Partnerships (LSAMP) program funded through the National Science Foundation (NSF) brings together partner institutions of higher education to promote student success. Teams of regional partners build programs to support their students in academic, research, and career achievement. Developing programs that meet the needs of a cooperative alliance composed of institutions of varying sizes and types requires logistical planning and flexibility. This paper presents a summary of factors that were considered as a new alliance, Southern and Central Illinois LSAMP (SCI-LSAMP), established through a multi-year planning process. The goal of the alliance was to create an integrated LSAMP program that facilitates students' growth within their home institutions and builds connections across the alliance’s partner institutions. Factors considered to build a cohesive program include existing institutional programming, research infrastructure, administrator and faculty workflow, schedules and needs, and conversations with established LSAMP programs. This paper aims to serve as a roadmap for new alliances to consider as they plan for multi-institution collaborations. 

Abstract Nonradiating optical anapoles are special configurations of charge‐current distributions that do not radiate. It was theoretically predicted that, for microspheres, electric and magnetic dipolar coefficients can simultaneously vanish by engineering the incident light, leading to the excitation of nonradiatinghybridoptical anapoles. In this work, the experimental detection of hybrid optical anapoles in dielectric microspheres (TiO₂) is reported using dual detection optical spectroscopy, developed to enable sequential measurement of forward and backward scattering under tightly‐focused Gaussian beam (TFGB) illumination. The results show that the excitation of TiO₂microspheres (diameter,d≈1 µm) under TFGB illumination leads to the appearance of scattering minima in both the forward and backward directions within specific wavelength ranges. These scattering minima are found to be due to vanishing electric and magnetic dipolar coefficients associated with hybrid optical anapoles. The ability to confine electromagnetic fields associated with hybrid optical anapoles can give rise to several novel optical phenomena and applications. 

Resonant excitation of high-index dielectric nanostructures and their coupling with molecular excitons provide great opportunities for engineering adaptable platforms for hybrid functional optical devices. Here, we numerically calculate resonance coupling of nonradiating anapole states to molecular excitons within silicon nanosphere-J-aggregate heterostructures under illumination with radially polarized cylindrical vector beams. The results show that the resonance coupling is accompanied by a scattering peak around the exciton transition frequency, and the anapole state splits into a pair of anticrossing eigenmodes with a mode splitting energy of ≈200meV. We also investigate the resonance coupling as a function of the J-aggregate parameters, such as thickness, exciton transition linewidth, and oscillator strength. Resonant coupling of the anapole states and J-aggregate heterostructures could be a promising platform for future nanophotonic applications such as in information processing and sensing.