Highly collimated and ultra-high-intensity near-field lasers by wavefront engineering

Nanophotonics, i.e. the science and technology of manipulating light at sub-wavelength scales, is emerging as one the most exciting and potentially useful areas of physical optics. I will highlight recent research in my group aimed at inventing and investigating a new class of light-sources with unique near field and far-field properties. Using surface plasmons (i.e. surface electromagnetic waves) interacting with metallic nanostructures built on the facets of semiconductor lasers. We have demonstrated new infrared light sources that can create extremely intense (~ 1 GW/cm²) nanoscale size light-spots of dimensions much smaller than the wavelength. These sources have revolutionary applications in areas such high density DVDpsilas (1 Tb disks) and high resolution chem/bio imaging for example to peer into the interior of cells.