Anderson localization in nanophotonic structures

Anderson localization is a cornerstone of our understanding of the interaction of light with disorder. But in the deep subwavelength regime, all photonic transport effects, including Anderson localization, become trivialized and effective medium theory should take over.

This talk will present work on subwavelength disordered multilayer structures – stacks of dielectric layers, where each is layer has an average thickness of lambda/40 (experimentally) or lambda/1000 (theoretically). But rather than being a weak effect, localization in this regime dominates transport completely and induces a rich regime of transport where disorder can sometimes increase transmission rather than reduce it. Furthermore, changing a single layer by 2 nm is shown to have a measurable effect on transport in visible wavelengths.