Related papers: Fundamental limits to near-field optical response

We develop an analytical framework to derive upper bounds to light--matter interactions in the optical near field, where applications ranging from spontaneous-emission amplification to greater-than-blackbody heat transfer show…

Photonic devices play an increasingly important role in advancing physics and engineering, and while improvements in nanofabrication and computational methods have driven dramatic progress in expanding the range of achievable optical…

Modern nanophotonic and meta-optical devices utilize a tremendous number of structural degrees of freedom to enhance light--matter interactions. A fundamental question is how large such enhancements can be. We develop an analytical…

In electromagnetics and photonics, "nonlocality" refers to the phenomenon by which the response/output of a material or system at a certain point in space depends on the input field across an extended region of space. While nonlocal effects…

Nanoscale fabrication techniques, computational inverse design, and fields from silicon photonics to metasurface optics are enabling transformative use of an unprecedented number of structural degrees of freedom in nanophotonics. A critical…

The electromagnetic local density of states (LDOS) is crucial to many aspects of photonics engineering, from enhancing emission of photon sources to radiative heat transfer and photovoltaics. We present a framework for evaluating upper…

This work studies the limits of far and near-field electromagnetic response of sub-wavelength scatterers, like the unitary limit and of lossless scatterers, and the ideal absorption limit of lossy particles. These limit behaviors are…

Tunable and multi-functional nanophotonic devices are used for applications from beam steering to sensing. Yet little is understood about fundamental limits to their functionality. The difficulty lies with the fact that it is a single…

Theoretical limits and physical bounds across many areas of science, mathematics, and technology -- including Shannon's information-capacity limits, Bennett and Landauer's thermodynamic limits on computation, and G\"odel's incompleteness…

Diffraction limits the behaviour of light in optical systems and sets the smallest achievable line width at half the wavelength. With a novel subwavelength plasmonic lens to reduce the diffraction via an asymmetry and to generate and…

Spaceplates are novel flat-optic devices that implement the optical response of a free-space volume over a smaller length, effectively "compressing space" for light propagation. Together with flat lenses such as metalenses or diffractive…

Optical near fields are at the heart of various applications in sensing and imaging. We investigate dipole scattering as a parameter estimation problem and show that optical near-fields carry more information about the location and the…

At visible and infrared frequencies, metals show tantalizing promise for strong subwavelength resonances, but material loss typically dampens the response. We derive fundamental limits to the optical response of absorptive systems, bounding…

We propose an approach to far-field optical imaging beyond the diffraction limit. The proposed system allows image magnification, is robust with respect to material losses and can be fabricated by adapting existing metamaterial technologies…

In an earlier paper we introduced the concept of the perfect lens which focuses both near and far electromagnetic fields, hence attaining perfect resolution. Here we consider refinements of the original prescription designed to overcome the…

The resolution of optical imaging devices is ultimately limited by the diffraction of light. To circumvent this limit, modern super-resolution microscopy techniques employ active interaction with the object by exploiting its optical…

The near-field and far-field spectral response of plasmonic systems are often assumed to be identical, due to the lack of methods that can directly compare and correlate both responses under similar environmental conditions. We develop a…

Rapid developments in the emerging field of stretchable and conformable photonics necessitate analytical expressions for boundary conditions at metasurfaces of arbitrary geometries. Here, we introduce the concept of conformal boundary…

When intense laser fields interact with nanoscale targets, strong-field physics meets plasmonic near-field enhancement and sub-wavelength localization of light. Photoemission spectra reflect the associated attosecond optical and electronic…

Essentially, the idea of improving the resolution of a given imaging system is to enhance its information capacity represented usually by the temporal-bandwidth (or, spatial-spectrum) product. This letter introduces the concept of…