Near-field optical properties of top-down and bottom-up nanostructures

This review presents a panel of theoretical and experimental results on optical properties near linear, curved, dashed or branched nanometric patterns made of both dielectric and metallic materials. State-of-the-art photonic planar structures can be split into two classes depending on whether they were obtained by top-down or bottom-up processes. The former have been extensively studied but remain large and simple in terms of feature size and architecture, respectively. The latter have only been made available recently and need much investigation of their near-field optical properties, yet they push the integration limit further and provide a new approach to complex architectures. In addition, we review the challenging problem of the light evanescent wave optical addressing of such devices in a subwavelength area. Finally, fundamental aspects related to the mechanisms of optical energy transport in such reduced geometry are also discussed.