ABSTRACT
Plasmonics opens up the gateway to the sub-wavelength world with its inherent ability to beat the Rayleigh limit. What is truly amazing is the fact that most of the related effects can be understood with an undergraduate background in classical optics, and all of it was around for so many years. Indeed, the past two decades have been an eye-opener, with novel effects arising from classical Maxwellian optics. Superlensing and superresolution, invisibility cloaks and extraordinary transmission are just a few examples. We now understand a large variety of effects under the banner of plasmonics with potential applications ranging from enhanced photovoltaics to imaging and surfaceenhanced spectroscopy to the precision spectroscopy of single molecules. In fact, there are many more unexplored areas.
