Design and Simulation of a Nanophotonic Traceable Memory Using Localized Energy Dissipation and Hierarchy of Optical Near-Field Interactions

Optical near-field interactions allow energy localization at scales smaller than the diffraction limit of light. They also show intrinsic hierarchical responses, meaning that optical near-fields exhibit different physical behavior at different scales. In this paper, by combining the localized energy dissipation and hierarchy properties, we present an architecture for a novel traceable optical memory that records memory access events to each bit, which is useful in applications such as high-security information transfer. The basic principles are demonstrated by numerical simulations using a metal nanostructure.