Nanoplasmonics: Towards efficient light harvesting
The control of light is vital to many applications, including imaging, communications, sensing, cancer treatment, and even welding processes for automobile parts. Transformation optics is an emerging field that has revolutionized our understanding of how to control light by constituting an effectively curved electromagnetic space. This revolutionary strategy not only revisits the fundamental physics of light-matter interactions, but also renders trivial the design of optical functions that may otherwise be difficult or virtually impossible, such as an "invisibility cloak," which could only previously be found in science fiction. When compared with ray optics, the new transformation optics technique provides a picture that is equally intuitive, but that is much more accurate in its description of the wave nature of light by using the electric and magnetic field lines as its basis.