ABSTRACT
Many innovations in medicine, optoelectronics, or computer
sciences rely on the development of newmaterials. To overcome the
limitations of the well-established fields of semiconductor (silicon)
and dielectric (glass fiber) materials, metal plasmonics recently
demonstrated high performances [1]. Indeed, since semiconductors
are limited in speed due to electric interconnects and dielectrics are
limited in size due to the diffraction limit, metallic nanostructures
seems to be ideal to reach higher speed and keep the size small, even
though they exhibit resistive losses due to the physical nature of
metal [2]. Therefore, hybrid nanomaterials are anticipated to be part
of new solutions for recently described paradigms in sciences, e.g.
optical nanocircuits [2]. Adapted from Brongersma and Shalaev [1],
Fig. 10.1 summarizes the advantages and limitations of the above-
mentioned materials.
