Nonradiating current configurations attract attention of physicists for many years as possible
models of stable atoms. One intriguing example of such a nonradiating source is known as
‘anapole’. An anapole mode can be viewed as a composition of electric and toroidal dipole
moments, resulting in destructive interference of the radiation fields due to similarity of
their far-field scattering patterns. Here we demonstrate experimentally that dielectric
nanoparticles can exhibit a radiationless anapole mode in visible. We achieve the spectral
overlap of the toroidal and electric dipole modes through a geometry tuning, and observe a
highly pronounced dip in the far-field scattering accompanied by the specific near-field
distribution associated with the anapole mode. The anapole physics provides a unique
playground for the study of electromagnetic properties of nontrivial excitations of complex
fields, reciprocity violation and Aharonov–Bohm like phenomena at optical frequencies.