Dielectrics in The Books Store

The development of advanced dielectric photonic structures has enabled tremendous control over the propagation and manipulation of light. Structures such as waveguides, splitters, mixers, and resonators now play a central role in the telecommunications industry. This book will discuss an exciting new class of photonic devices, known as surface plasmon nanophotonic structures. Surface plasmons are easily accessible excitations in metals and semiconductors and involve a collective motion of the conduction electrons. These excitations can be exploited to manipulate electromagnetic waves at optical frequencies ("light") in new ways that are unthinkable in conventional dielectric structures. The field of plasmon nanophotonics is rapidly developing and impacting a wide range of areas including: electronics, photonics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. The book will highlight several exciting new discoveries that have been made, while providing a clear discussion of the underlying physics, the nanofabrication issues, and the materials considerations involved in designing plasmonic devices with new functionality.

The book is aimed at researchers and students interested in entering the field of plasmon nanophotonics, while serving as a reference to scientists already active in this area of research. It is written at the level of a first year graduate student with some background in electromagnetic theory and working knowledge of Maxwell’s equations.

Will nanoelectronic devices continue to scale according to Moore’s law? At this moment, there is no easy answer since gate scaling is rapidly emerging as a serious roadblock for the evolution of CMOS technology. Channel engineering based on high-mobility semiconductor materials (e.g. strained Si, alternative orientation substrates, Ge or III-V compounds) could help overcome the obstacles since they offer performance enhancement. There are several concerns though. Do we know how to make complex engineered substrates (e.g. Germanium-on-Insulator)? Which are the best interface passivation methodologies and (high-k) gate dielectrics on Ge and III-V compounds? Can we process these materials in short channel transistors using flows, toolsets and know how similar to that in Si technology? How do these materials and devices behave at the nanoscale? The reader will get a clear view of what has been done so far, what is the state-of-the-art and which are the main challenges ahead before we come any close to a viable Ge and III-V MOS technology.