Recent work led by Hatice Altug, EPFL, has used bound states to create ultrasensitive biosensing devices targeted for personalized medicine. [EPFL / Bionanophotonic Systems laboratory]
The physics of resonant nanostructures, which can trap light at the subwavelength scales and form high-density concentrations of electromagnetic energy, are driving advances in nanophotonics and metamaterials, taking the world closer to schemes for all-optical communication and data processing. For dielectric nanoscale structures in particular, the optical response depends on Mie resonances that not only strongly enhance light’s electric- and magnetic-field components, but also enable complex wavefront control, including modulation of amplitude, phase, dispersion and polarization of light (see “Meta-optics with Mie resonances,” OPN, January 2017).