Nano Lett. http://doi.org/snp (2014)

Plasmonics, the revolutionary field that merged photonics, electronics and nanotechnology, has enabled the possibility of controlling light at the nanoscale. Excitons are now emerging as an alternative means to allow similar nanoscale manipulation capabilities of electromagnetic waves. A variety of materials that can sustain exitonic long-range waves able to couple with light, called surface exciton polaritons (SEP), have been demonstrated in the past 40 years. Now, Bill Barnes and co-workers have proposed the possibility of exciting localized SEP modes, which have so far been the missing ingredient for excitonic light manipulation at the nanoscale. By studying dye-doped polymers, they show the existence of a negative real permittivity region and theoretically predict that these nanostructured materials can support localized SEP modes that induce field-enhancement and subwavelength field confinement, the two fundamental features that have made plasmonics so successful.