Plasmons compressing the light- A jewel in the treasure chest of Mark Stockman's legacy

Abstract

Among all the contributions made by Mark Stockman, his work on concentrating the light energy to unprecedented densities is one of the most remarkable achievements. Here it is briefly reviewed and a relatively novel, intuitive, and physically transparent interpretation of nanofocusing using the effective volume of hybrid coupled modes formalism is presented and the role of Landau damping as the main limiting factor is highlighted.