Circuits with Light at Nanoscales: Optical Nanocircuits Inspired by Metamaterials

A form of optical circuitry is overviewed in which a tapestry of subwavelength nanometer-scale metamaterial structures and nanoparticles may provide a mechanism for tailoring, patterning, and manipulating local optical electric fields and electric displacement vectors in a subwavelength domain, leading to the possibility of optical information processing at the nanometer scale. By exploiting the optical properties of metamaterials, these nanoparticles may play the role of "lumped" nanocircuit elements such as nanoinductors, nanocapacitors, and nanoresistors, analogous to microelectronics. I show that this concept of metamaterial-inspired nanoelectronics ("metactronics") can bring the tools and mathematical…