It is the role of work package 1 to design and fabricate EDC structures and experiments to probe the limits of the possible light confinement and the associated light-matter interaction enhancement.
Focusing of light in dielectrics is bounded by the diffraction limit, wherefore it appears to have been a broadly accepted wizdom, that light in optical microstructures cannot be localized to volumes smaller than roughly the cubic wavelength. The mere existence of EDC defies this wizdom. We will investigate EDC in different material platforms using process technologies mastered at a very high level by our consortium. In particular, we will use silicon-on-insulator technology as well as our in-house InP and AlGaAs-on-insulator material platforms to investigate deep subwavelength confinement as well as resulting effects, such as Purcell factors and enhanced nonlinearities.