Optical 'shorting wires'

Connecting lumped circuit elements in a conventional circuit is usually accomplished by conducting wires that act as conduits for the conduction currents with negligible potential drops. More challenging, however, is to extend these concepts to optical nanocircuit elements. Here, following our recent development of optical lumped circuit elements, we show how a special class of nanowaveguides formed by a thin core with relatively large (positive or negative) permittivity surrounded by a thin concentric shell with low permittivity may provide the required analogy to 'wires' for optical nano-circuits. (c) 2007 Optical Society of America.