摘要 : We present an overview of recent advances within the field of slow- and stopped-light in metamaterial and plasmonic waveguides. We start by elucidating the mechanisms by which these configurations can enable complete stopping of l... 展开 We present an overview of recent advances within the field of slow- and stopped-light in metamaterial and plasmonic waveguides. We start by elucidating the mechanisms by which these configurations can enable complete stopping of light. Decoherence mechanisms may destroy the zero-group-velocity condition for real-frequency/complex-wavevector modes, but we show that metamaterial and nanoplasmonic waveguides also support complex-frequency/real-wavevector modes that uphold the light-stopping condition. A further point of focus is how, by using gain, dissipative losses can be overcome in the slow- and stopped-light regimes. To this end, on the basis of full-wave finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations and analytic transfer-matrix calculations, we show that the incorporation of thin layers made of an active medium, placed adjacently to the core layer of a negative-refractive-index waveguide, can fully remove dissipative losses in a slow- or stopped-light regime where the effective index of the guided lightwave remains negative. 收起