Plasmonic Nanoguides and Circuits

Modern communication systems dealing with huge amounts of data at ever increasing speed try to utilize the best aspects of electronic and optical circuits. Electronic circuits are tiny but their operation speed is limited, whereas optical circuits are extremely fast but their sizes are limited by diffraction. Waveguide components utilizing surface plasmon (SP) modes were found to combine the huge optical bandwidth and compactness of electronics, and plasmonics thereby began to be considered as the next chip-scale technology. In this book, the authors concentrate on the SP waveguide configurations ensuring nanoscale confinement and review the current status of this rapidly emerging field, considering different configurations being developed for nanoscale plasmonic guides and circuits. Both fundamental physics and application aspects of plasmonics are reviewed in detail by the world's leading experts.

A unique feature of this book is its strong focus on a particular subfield of plasmonics dealing with subwavelength (nanoscale) waveguiding, an area which is especially important in view of the explosively growing interest in plasmonic interconnects and nanocircuits. This research direction came to the fore very recently, driven by the ever-increasing demand for faster and smaller interconnects to be used inside computer chips, and stimulated by the progress in our understanding of basic physical phenomena involved in SP excitation, imaging and manipulation.