Current developments in optical technologies are being directed toward nanoscale devices with subwavelength dimensions, in which photons are manipulated on the nanoscale. Although light is clearly the fastest means to send information to and from the nanoscale, there is a fundamental incompatibility between light at the microscale and devices and processes at the nanoscale. Nanostructured metals which support surface plasmon modes can concentrate electromagnetic (EM) fields to a small fraction of a wavelength while enhancing local field strengths by several orders of magnitude. For this...

Random inhomogeneous media may possess unique physical properties that are significantly enhanced and may attain a level of practical importance and versatility that rivals or surpasses their geometrically ordered counterparts. Making judicious use of these enhancement effects, as well as of other aspects of the many complex resonances that distinguish these systems, can lead to new and unexpected physics and many applications. Localization of various sorts of optical excitations occur and recur in a wide gamut of disordered systems, leading to the enhancement of many optical phenomena,...