Modeling optical nanontennas for nonlinearity enhancement, polarization control, communications and energy harvesting

We discuss the general use, potentials and computational challenges associated with optical nanoantennas. These engineered nanoparticles may be used to enhance and tailor the linear and nonlinear response of optical materials and they may realize novel optical devices for optical communications, computing, energy harvesting, sensing and polarization control. By translating some of the familiar radio-frequency concepts to optical antennas, we have proposed in recent years a variety of exciting possibilities for optical antennas, in order to realize nanodevices with linear and nonlinear properties not available in conventional optical materials and systems. We propose that collections of plasmonic nanoparticles may realize the true bridge between unconventional nanoscale optical processing and far-field propagation and radiation. In this talk, we describe the involved phenomena and the challenges and opportunities associated with their numerical modelling.