Physical limits on electromagnetic response

Abstract

Photonic devices play an increasingly important role in advancing physics and engineering, and while improvements in nanofabrication and computational methods have driven dramatic progress in expanding the range of achievable optical characteristics, they have also greatly increased design complexity. These developments have led to heightened relevance for the study of fundamental limits on optical response. Here, we review recent progress in our understanding of these limits with special focus on an emerging theoretical framework that combines computational optimization with conservation laws to yield physical limits capturing all relevant wave effects. Results pertaining to canonical electromagnetic problems such as thermal emission, scattering cross sections, Purcell enhancement, and power routing are presented. Finally, we identify areas for additional research, including conceptual extensions and efficient numerical schemes for handling large-scale problems.

arXiv comment22 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (32)

• Training deep neural networks for the inverse design of nanophotonic structures
• How to face the loss in plasmonics and metamaterials
• Engineering the Photonic Density of States with metamaterials
• Broadband super-Planckian thermal emission from hyperbolic metamaterials
• "Light Sail" Acceleration Revisited
• Opposites Attract - A Theorem About The Casimir Force
• High-NA Achromatic Metalenses by Inverse Design
• Inverse design in photonics by topology optimization: tutorial
• General Theory of Spontaneous Emission Near Exceptional Points
• Fundamental limits to optical response in absorptive systems
• Maximizing the quality factor to mode volume ratio for ultra-small photonic crystal cavities
• Fundamental limits for non-contact transfers between two bodies
• Fundamental Limit to Linear One-Dimensional Slow Light Structures
• Shape-Independent Limits to Near-Field Radiative Heat Transfer
• Overlapping domains for topology optimization of large-area metasurfaces
• Fundamental limits to nanoparticle extinction
• Physical Bounds on Absorption and Scattering for Cloaked Sensors
• Minimization of Antenna Quality Factor
• Trade-off Between Antenna Efficiency and Q-Factor
• Fundamental limits to radiative heat transfer: the limited role of nanostructuring in the near field
• Fundamental limits to radiative heat transfer: theory
• Optimal Composition of Modal Currents For Minimal Quality Factor Q
• Computational bounds to light-matter interactions via local conservation laws
• The ultimate absorption at light scattering by a single obstacle
• On the Computation of Power in Volume Integral Equation Formulations
• $\mathbb{T}$-operator bounds on angle-integrated absorption and thermal radiation for arbitrary objects
• Optimal Planar Electric Dipole Antenna
• Fundamental limits to attractive and repulsive Casimir--Polder forces
• Topology-optimized Dual-Polarization Dirac Cones
• Rigorous sufficient conditions for index-guided mode in microstructured dielectric waveguides
• How Do Space-Time Digital Metasurfaces Serve to Perform Analog Signal Processing?
• Minimum Dielectric-Resonator Mode Volumes