Nanophotonics for optical communications

In recent years a variety of cutting-edge nanophotonics technologies, such as plasmonics, photonic crystals, nano-wires, nano-particles, are extensively studied. They have already demonstrated various device performances surpassing those of conventional photonic devices based on ordinary materials. Most of these technologies are enabling ultrasmall photonic devices that can be densely integrated in a chip and consume a very small amount of energy per bit operation. Though many of them are still at the fundamental research level, they hold the promise to introduce large-scale photonics into a chip, such as MPU (micro-processing unit), thereby having an impact on future telecom/datacom. Therefore the time has come to hold a symposium specialized on nanophotonics technologies in ECOC. The purpose of this symposium is to present cutting-edge achievements in various areas of nanophotonics, and to shed light on their potential for future telecom/datacom. Especially, the objective is to clarify how these nanophotonics technologies will be able to solve problems confronting ICT (telecom/datacom) in the next 10 years. Six topics will be discusse, representing important fields in nanophotonics, covering several devices (lasers, switches, modulators, and detectors) based on plasmonics, photonic crystals, nano-wires, and nano-particles.