New opportunities in electromagnetics with nanotechnologies

Electromagnetics is a mature field which is ubiquitous in everyday life. All communication systems rely, to a certain extent, on electromagnetic devices such as antennas and waveguides. Furthermore, the ever increasing demand for high capacity and small size systems calls for novel avenues for miniaturization and integration. Conventional electromagnetic devices suffer from a fundamental tradeoff between size and functionality, originating from the fact that the interaction between all classical materials and electromagnetic waves reduces as their size decreases. Therefore, new materials immune of these fundamental drawbacks must be explored. Nanotechnology, the study of materials and structures with at least one of dimension in the order of the nanometer [1], offers a potential solution. Conceptualized for the first time in 1956 by Richard Feynman in his famous talk “There´s plenty of room at the bottom” [2], nanotechnology can now routinely produce nanomaterials with controlled structural and functional parameters in the nano or even atomic scale. Some of these nanomaterials are not only able to strongly interact with electromagnetic waves, despite their dimensions being much smaller than the wavelength, but they also exhibit totally new phenomena, not found in conventional materials. Here, we provide three illustrative examples from our recent work on nanoelectromagnetics, which show how the combination of electromagnetics and nanotechnology can lead to devices with unprecedented characteristics.