November 22, 2008
As discussed in a recent overview artlcle, optics meets nanotechnology in plasmonics, an emerging technology that exploits electromagnetic waves tightly coupled to metal surfaces.
Light can be coupled into and out of surface plasmons, in which free-space wavelengths of ~500 nm can be reduced by an order of magnitude and interact with waveguides, apertures, resonators (etc.) [...]
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November 10, 2008
Framework-directed self assembly
Researchers have amassed a wonderful collection of functional, atomically precise components with potentially useful properties — optical, electronic, chemical, mechanical, and so on — but they haven’t been assembled to make complex, atomically precise nanosystems. I think of this as the “circuit-board problem”: Functional devices are small, simple, and may have interesting physics, [...]
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