Light confined to the nanoscale
Nanophotonics describes light confined to the nanoscale by small nanostructures or particles.
In conventional far-field optics, light waves cannot be focused to a scale below half their wavelength because of diffraction. Special techniques are required to overcome this limitation and benefit in the ‘near field’ from fast and lossless information transport by light at the size scale of electronics for signal processing. Different components must be fabricated to build nanophotonic devices: sources, waveguides and detectors specifically designed for the wavelength.
