Photons lost in a maze Enhancing the interaction between light
and matter is the essence of many research disciplines,
including quantum information science, energy harvesting and
optical biosensing. The traditional method has been to strongly
confine light in, for example, a highly ordered nanocavity.
Surprisingly, an alternative approach to confinement of waves
exists, originally proposed by Philip Anderson, and for which he
was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. Using this approach,
disordered materials are employed, giving rise to random and
multiple scattering of the propagating light waves. For a
certain amount of randomness of the structures, so-called
Anderson localized modes form spontaneously: light is trapped in
a maze. A challenge in this research field has been to determine
how well light can be confined based on random disorder. In a
recent paper in New Journal of Physics researchers from The
Quantum Photonics Group at DTU Fotonik have developed an
efficient method for exciting Anderson-localiz