The nowadays challenges in micro-electronics and photonics are partially directed to increase the speed of devices and reduce their physical dimensions and operation power. Novel materials, light sources, and development of electronics-to-photonics interfaces, can provide solutions for some of the challenges.
We demonstrated both theoretically and experimentally various devices for nano-confinement of IR light along with some of their fundamental focusing limits and new families of plasmonic particles with unique optical properties. In addition, we introduce all-semiconductor tunable low-loss negative-index metamaterials based on coupled quantum wells and dots and quantum-cascade plasmonic sources. As additional type of sources, we investigate a novel process of semiconductor two-photon emission, employed to generation and detection non-classical states of light, and opening new horizons for all-semiconductor room-temperature quantum communication technologies.