  Realization of electromagnetic energy confinement beyond the diffraction
limit is of paramount importance for novel applications like nano-imaging,
information processing, and energy harvest. Current approaches based on surface
plasmon polaritons and photonic crystals are either intrinsically lossy or with
low coupling efficiency. Herein, we successfully address these challenges by
constructing an array of nonradiative anapoles that originate from the
destructive far-field interference of electric and toroidal dipole modes. The
proposed metachain can achieve ultracompact (1/13 of incident wavelength) and
high-efficiency electromagnetic energy transfer without the coupler. We
experimentally investigate the proposed metachain at mid-infrared and give the
first near-field experimental evidence of anapole-based energy transfer, in
which the spatial profile of anapole mode is also unambiguously identified at
nanoscale. We further demonstrate the metachain is intrinsically lossless and
scalable at infrared wavelengths, realizing a 90$^\circ$ bending loss down to
0.32 dB at the optical communication wavelength. The present scheme bridges the
gap between the energy confinement and transfer of anapoles, and opens a new
gate for more compactly integrated photonic and energy devices, which can
operate in a broad spectral range.
