There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

The emerging field of plasmonics has yielded methods for guiding and localizing light at the nanoscale, well below the scale of the wavelength of light in free space. Now plasmonics researchers are turning their attention to photovoltaics, where design approaches based on plasmonics can be used to improve absorption in photovoltaic devices, permitting a considerable reduction in the physical thickness of solar photovoltaic absorber layers, and yielding new options for solar-cell design. In this review, we survey recent advances at the intersection of plasmonics and photovoltaics and offer an outlook on the future of solar cells based on these principles.

Plasmonics for improved photovoltaic devices

The unprecedented ability of nanometallic (that is, plasmonic) structures to concentrate light into deep-subwavelength volumes has propelled their use in a vast array of nanophotonics technologies and research endeavours. Plasmonic light concentrators can elegantly interface diffraction-limited dielectric optical components with nanophotonic structures. Passive and active plasmonic devices provide new pathways to generate, guide, modulate and detect light with structures that are similar in size to state-of-the-art electronic devices. With the ability to produce highly confined optical fields, the conventional rules for light-matter interactions need to be re-examined, and researchers are venturing into new regimes of optical physics. In this review we will discuss the basic concepts behind plasmonics-enabled light concentration and manipulation, make an attempt to capture the wide range of activities and excitement in this area, and speculate on possible future directions.

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Plasmonics for extreme light concentration and manipulation.

This Review summarizes the simultaneous transmission of several independent spatial channels of light along optical fibres to expand the data-carrying capacity of optical communications. Recent results achieved in both multicore and multimode optical fibres are documented.

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Space-division multiplexing in optical fibres

Hybrid plasmonic waveguides are described that employ a high-gain semiconductor nanostructure functioning as a gain medium that is separated from a metal substrate surface by a nanoscale thickness thick low-index gap. The waveguides are capable of efficient generation of sub-wavelength high intensity light and have the potential for large modulation bandwidth >1 THz.

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Plasmon lasers at deep subwavelength scale

We show that by combining mid-link spectral-inversion with the duobinary data modulation format, a robust, highly dispersion tolerant 40-Gbit/s transmission system is created.

Dispersion tolerant, 40Gbit duobinary over 800km without in-line dispersion management

A long-haul transmission of 1.28Tb/s quad-subcarrier PM-16QAM based superchannel (5.0bit/s/Hz) employing EDFA only/ EDFA-Raman amplification schemes is reported. Maximum recorded reach is 3,000km/ 2,050km and 3,350km/2,250km without and with DBP for LAPSCF/ SSMF, respectively.

1.28Tb/s long-haul superchannel transmission employing EDFA-Raman amplification

In this paper, the performance of mid-link spectral inversion (MLSI)-based transmission is quantitatively compared to the performance for 'conventional' dispersion compensating fiber (DCF)-based transmission. Bit error rates (BER) are measured at optimized residual dispersion for all sixteen channels after 800km transmission in standard single mode fiber (SSMF). We show that for the MLSI-based configuration up to a decade of improvement in BER is obtained compared to the DCF based system. MLSI has the potential of lowering the cost of long haul transmission systems since instead of having multiple DCF modules per span only one spectral inverter is required for the whole transmission line. For spectral inversion, a polarization independent magnesium-oxide-doped periodically-poled lithium-niobate (MgO:PPLN) based subsystem was used.

Huug de Waardt

Papers

Dispersion tolerant, 40Gbit duobinary over 800km without in-line dispersion management

1.28Tb/s long-haul superchannel transmission employing EDFA-Raman amplification

Experimental comparison of mid-link spectral inversion and conventional DCF-based transmission in a DWDM system at 40Gbit/s