NanoPhoton - Center for Nanophotonics

The research vision of NanoPhoton - Center for Nanophotonics is to explore hitherto inaccessible regimes of extreme confinement of light in dielectric cavities and to apply the associated enhanced light-matter interaction to solve fundamental outstanding challenges in chip-scale information technology. A number of recent optical cavity designs have shown a path towards confining light at deep subwavelength dimensions in dielectrics. This phenomenon - which we refer to as Extreme Dielectric Confinement (EDC) - parts with the conventional wisdom in optics and nanotechnology that light cannot be localized to volumes smaller than roughly the cubic resonance wavelength. In addition to being of theoretical interest in its own right, EDC opens up new technological possibilities for novel optical nanostructures. It is the ambition of NanoPhoton to develop the science and technology for this new class of nanostructures by combining fundamental electromagnetic and quantum optical theory wit...