Illuminating the Future: Nanophotonics for Future Green Technologies, Precision Healthcare, and Optical Computing

TL;DR

This review discusses recent advances in nanophotonics, highlighting innovations in material design and applications across energy, healthcare, and computing, while addressing current challenges and future prospects.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent progress in nanophotonic principles, applications, and future trends, emphasizing novel materials and multidisciplinary approaches.

Findings

Enhanced solar energy conversion efficiencies nearing theoretical limits.

Unprecedented sensitivity in biosensing for diagnostics and environmental monitoring.

Nanophotonics enables ultra-fast, energy-efficient optical neural networks.

Abstract

Nanophotonics, an interdisciplinary field merging nanotechnology and photonics, has enabled transformative advancements across diverse sectors including green energy, biomedicine, and optical computing. This review comprehensively examines recent progress in nanophotonic principles and applications, highlighting key innovations in material design, device engineering, and system integration. In renewable energy, nanophotonic allows light-trapping nanostructures and spectral control in perovskite solar cells, concentrating solar power, and thermophotovoltaics. That have significantly enhanced solar conversion efficiencies, approaching theoretical limits. For biosensing, nanophotonic platforms achieve unprecedented sensitivity in detecting biomolecules, pathogens, and pollutants, enabling real-time diagnostics and environmental monitoring. Medical applications leverage tailored light-matter interactions for precision photothermal therapy, image-guided surgery, and early disease detection. Furthermore, nanophotonics underpins next-generation optical neural networks and neuromorphic computing, offering ultra-fast, energy-efficient alternatives to von Neumann architectures. Despite rapid growth, challenges in scalability, fabrication costs, and material stability persist. Future advancements will rely on novel materials, AI-driven design optimization, and multidisciplinary approaches to enable scalable, low-cost deployment. This review summarizes recent progress and highlights future trends, including novel material systems, multidisciplinary approaches, and enhanced computational capabilities, to pave the way for transformative applications in this rapidly evolving field.