Nanophotonics

1.        General Introduction and overview of the text:  Qualitative remarks about the systems and effects found in nanophotonics and their important technological applications. 

2.       Mathematical Preliminaries:

a.       Treatments of the effective dielectric properties of composites.

b.      Treatments of the properties of periodic systems including Block waves, band structure, Wannier functions, and tight binding models.

c.       Discussions of the finite difference time domain method and the method of moments.

d.      Discussions of forces on mano-particles and atoms arising from gradients in the electromagnetic field intensities.

e.      Summary of the basic properties of nonlinear optics:  Kerr effect and second harmonic generation.

3.       Photonic crystals:

a.       Treatment of photonic crystal band structure and its effect on the decay rate of excited atoms.

b.      Discussion of photonic crystal cavities, lasers, and nano-cavity lasers.

c.       Discussions of photonic crystal waveguides and their properties including both linear and nonlinear optical materials.

ii.                   Treatments of soliton modes in photonic crystal waveguides

d.      Treatment of nonlinear effect of photonic crystal diodes and transistors.

e.      Discussions of photonic crystal circuits and possible applications.

4.        Metamaterials:

b.      Discussions of how artificial nano-features such as split ring resonators function and how they can be used to design metamaterials with any desired refractive properties.

c.       Treatment of the perfect lens.

d.      Treatment of electromagnetic cloaking.

e.      Treatment of Cherenkov and other radiative interactions and effects in negative index materials.

5.       Plasmmonics:

a.       Discussions of the basic properties of surface plasmon-polaritons.

b.      Treatment of plasmonic circuits.

c.       Discussion of the properties of negative index materials in plasmonics.

d.      Treatment of the enhanced transmission through gratings.

e.      Discussion of the role of surface plasmons-polaritons in rough surface scattering and transmission.

f.        Treatment of the principles of surface enhanced Raman scattering.

g.       Discussions of some basic applications of plasmonic technology.

6.       Subwavelength focusing:

a.       Discussions of optical resolution and the problems involved in obtaining a perfectly resolved image.

b.      Discussions of various methods of achieving subwavelength resolution.

c.       Refinement of the discussions of the perfect lens to give detailed treatment of how a perfect image is achieved by metamaterial technology.

7.       Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscopy

a.       Presentation of an introduction to the basic ideas of near-field optics and near-field scanning optical microscopy.

b.      Discussions of various device implementation of these ideas.

8.       Optical tweezers:

a.       General discussions of the manipulation of nano-particles and atoms.

b.      Discussions of applications in biology and nano-physics.

9.       Trapped Atoms:

a.       Discussions of types of atomic traps.

c.       Discussions of entanglement and some ideas of quantum computing.

d.      Basic ideas of optical lattices and some applications are presented.

10.    Discussions of some of the basic techniques of experimental implementation of the ideas of nanophotonics.