Information physics fundamentals of nanophotonics

Abstract

Nanophotonics has been extensively studied with the aim of unveiling and exploiting light-matter interactions that occur at a scale below the diffraction limit of light, and recent progress made in experimental technologies--both in nanomaterial fabrication and characterization--is driving further advancements in the field. From the viewpoint of information, on the other hand, novel architectures, design and analysis principles, and even novel computing paradigms should be considered so that we can fully benefit from the potential of nanophotonics. This paper examines the information physics aspects of nanophotonics. More specifically, we present some fundamental and emergent information properties that stem from optical excitation transfer mediated by optical near-field interactions and the hierarchical properties inherent in optical near-fields. We theoretically and experimentally investigate aspects such as unidirectional signal transfer, energy efficiency and networking effects, among others, and we present their basic theoretical formalisms and describe demonstrations of practical applications. A stochastic analysis of light-assisted material formation is also presented, where an information-based approach provides a deeper understanding of the phenomena involved, such as self-organization. Furthermore, the spatio-temporal dynamics of optical excitation transfer and its inherent stochastic attributes are utilized for solution searching, paving the way to a novel computing paradigm that exploits coherent and dissipative processes in nanophotonics.

Analysis of optical near-field energy transfer by stochastic model unifying architectural dependencies

“…More detailed modeling will be needed to fully explain this, for example, by including state filling effects which may occur in cases where the excitation power is high. 19 This will be one of the topics of future work.…”

“…19 We consider a quantum dot based on a semiconductor material with a bulk electric dipole moment, on which a lightwave with a specific resonance frequency is incident. For the electronic system confined in a quantum dot, the electronic wave operator includes an envelope function of electronic waves in the quantum dot.…”

“…19 Here we assume two spherical quantum dots whose radii are S R and L R , which we call QD S and QD L , respectively, as shown in Fig. 2 (a).…”

Category Theory Approach to Solution Searching Based on Photoexcitation Transfer Dynamics

“…A detailed treatment of the modeling can be found in [14]. Essentially, the same formulation is found in the research on environment-assisted quantum walks [26,27].…”

“…In fact, Naruse et al theoretically and experimentally demonstrated that the versatile spatiotemporal dynamics induced in multiple-quantum-dot systems by optical near-field interactions can be used to solve CSP [9,14] and MAB [15,16]. Furthermore, Aono et al showed that the satisfiability problem (SAT), which is known to be one of the most important NP-complete problems, can be solved [14]. Naruse et al also demonstrated solving MAB by using single photons emitted from a nanodiamond [17].…”