Introduction to Nanophotonics

The aim of this textbook is to provide an overview of nanophotonics, a discipline which was developed around the turn of the millennium. This unique and rapidly evolving subject area is the result of a collaboration between various scientific communities working on different aspects of light-matter interaction at the nanoscale. These include near-field optics and super-resolution microscopy, photonic crystals, diffractive optics, plasmonics, optoelectronics, synthesis of metallic and semiconductor nanoparticles, two-dimensional materials, and metamaterials.

The book is aimed at graduate students with a background in physics, electrical engineering, material science, or chemistry, as well as lecturers and researchers working within these fields.

Henri Benisty, Full Professor, Institut d’Optique, Université Paris-Saclay, Jean-Jacques Greffet, Full Professor, Institut d’Optique, Université Paris-Saclay, Philippe Lalanne, CNRS Research Director, Laboratoire Photonique, Numérique et Nanosciences

Henri Benisty received his PhD in electrochemistry in 1989 in Paris, working on the photonics of semiconductor integrated optics devices and LEDs enhanced with microcavities and two-dimensional photonic crystals, with the aim to improve either light confinement or light extraction. He is the co-founder of the French startup Genewave (now merged with Finnish Mobidiag), which works on fluorescence biochips. He has contributed to studies of sensors featuring a resonant waveguide grating response in various contexts and was instrumental to introducing the the idea of plasmonic losses within the recently introduced topic of parity-time symmetry in optics.

Jean-Jacques Greffet is an alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris-Saclay. He received his PhD in solid state physics in 1988 from Université Paris-Sud working in light scattering by rough surfaces. Between 1994 and 2005, he worked on the theory of image formation in near-field optics. Since 1998, he has made a number of seminal contributions to the field of thermal radiation at the nanoscale including the demonstration of coherent thermal sources and the prediction and measurement of giant radiative heat transfer at the nanoscale due to surface phonon polaritons. Since 2000, he has contributed to the field of quantum plasmonics and light emission with nanoantennas and metasurfaces.

Philippe Lalanne is an alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de St Cloud. Currently, he is a CNRS researcher working at Bordeaux University. He is an expert in nanoscale electrodynamics, with an emphasis on modelling and theory. His current research is devoted to understanding how light interacts with subwavelength structures to demonstrate novel optical functionalities. He has launched new modal theories and has pioneered the development of large-NA metalenses with high-index nanostructures in the 1990s.