The development of integrated electronic and photonic circuits has led to remarkable data processing and transport capabilities that permeate almost every facet of our daily lives. Scaling these devices to smaller and smaller dimensions has enabled faster, more efficient, and less expensive components but has also brought about a myriad of new challenges. Currently, two of the most daunting problems preventing significant increases in processor speed are thermal and RC delay time issues with electronic interconnection. Optical interconnects do not exhibit such problems and posses an almost unimaginably large data carrying capacity. Unfortunately, the reduction in size of dielectric waveguides is fundamentally limited by the diffraction limit of light, imposing a lower size limit on a guided light mode of about l/2n (about 0.5 mm). Indeed, photonic structures tend to still be at least 1 or 2 orders of magnitude larger than their electronic counterparts. This obvious size mismatch between electronic and photonic components has presented major problems in interfacing these technologies, creating a bottleneck that prevents higher data processing speeds. It thus appears that further progress will require the development of radically new device technologies that can facilitate information transport between nanoscale devices at optical frequencies and form a bridge between world of nano-electronic and micro-photonics.

At first sight, it seems that the materials used in current CMOS integrated circuit technologies were chosen to optimize the electronic chip performance. However, upon closer examination these materials are also suitable for generating, manipulating, and detecting optical signals. The unique properties of Si nanostructures such as nanoparticles and nanowires can be exploited to fabricate Si-based light sources and detectors. Si and SiO2 can be used to fabricate ultra-high quality factor optical micro-resonators for light modulation and generation. The unique optical properties of nanomettallic (plasmonic) structures can be exploited to improve the synergy between electronic and photonic components. These examples support the idea that photonic components based on CMOS compatible materials posses the right combination of properties to tackle the issues outlined above and realize the dream of even faster chips.

During this presentation it will become clear that the fields of nanophotonics and plasmonics are currently undergoing rapid growth and provide a whole range of new opportunities in addition to increasing chip performance. I will describe a number of other recent exciting developments in these fields related to solar cells, nanoscale imaging and optical spectroscopy, nanoscale thermal engineering and catalysis, non-linear optics, and quantum optics.

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