Advances in stimulating Raman scattering in nanostructures

Stimulated Raman scattering is essentially a “light amplification,” and some of the most important applications are light amplifiers and laser sources. Important achievements have been obtained in the fields of fiber amplification and integrated photonics. However, photonics components, currently used in optical interconnects, are relatively large and not ideally suited to on-chip integration. A reduction in the size of integrated optical devices, while maintaining a high level of performance, is a key challenge in photonics. On this line of argument, the ability to construct nano-objects is expected to have a significant impact in the future, leading to the development of fully functional nanodevices, such as nanoscale optical sources. The aim of this work is to review accomplishments in the field of stimulated Raman scattering in nanostructures, to delineate the state of the art, and to identify the emerging trends and remaining challenges.