What is it about?
This is a comprehensive overview of large amount of work done around the world on the subject of light working together with magnetism at a very small scale (some tens to hundreds of nanometers). Bringing light to such a small scale, often much smaller than the wavelength of light, allows to work very selectively with any light-sensitive or light-driven processes, like chemical reactions, biological and chemical sensing or magnetic memory reading and writing.
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Why is it important?
Combining light and magnetism brings substantial technological advances in many fields. For magnetism, allowing light to work at the nanoscale potentially makes devices like hard-drives 10 000 times faster and 100 times smaller. For light, coupling to magnetism potentially brings the magnetic tunability to the optical lenses, switches, polarisers and the future light-based computation devices that are fast, small and extremely energy-efficient.
Perspectives
Merging light and magnetism is not straightforward as completely different time- (magnetism is slow and light is fast) and length-scales (magnetism acts very far, whereas when light is confined to the nanoscale its action range measures in nanometers) are involved. But the potential benefits are so large that it's worth trying. This review helps the researchers and technologists getting up to speed with what happened in this extremely active area of research and development in the past years.
Professor Alexandre Dmitriev
University of Gothenburg
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Nanoscale magnetophotonics, Journal of Applied Physics, February 2020, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/1.5100826.
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