The interest in complex systems has increased exponentially during the past years because it was found helpful in addressing many of today's challenges. The study of the brain, biology, earthquakes, markets and social sciences are only a few examples of the fields that have benefited from the investigation of complex systems. Internet, the increased mobility of people and the raising energy demand are among the factors that brought in contact complex systems that were isolated till a few years ago. A theory for the interaction between complex systems is becoming more and more urgent to help mankind in this transition. The present work builds upon the most recent results in this field by solving a theoretical problem that prevented previous work to be applied to important complex systems, like the brain. It also shows preliminary laboratory results of perturbation of in vitro neural networks that were done to test the theory. Finally, it gives a preview of the studies that are being done to create a theory that is even closer to the interaction between real complex systems.

Recent experimentation with excitation of surface plasmons on a gold film in the Kretschmann configuration have shown what appears to be a superconductive effect. Researchers claimed to see the existence of electron pairing during scattering as well as magnetic field repulsion while twisting the polarization of the laser. In an attempt to explain this, they pointed to a combination of electron-electron scattering in external fields as well as dynamic screening via intense laser radiation. This paper expands upon the latter, taking a look at the properties of a dynamic polarization function, its effects on bulk and surface plasmon dispersion relations, and its various consequences.

This dissertation focuses on two aspects of integrating near-infrared plasmonics with electronics with the intent of developing the platform for future photonics. The first aspect focuses on fabrication by introducing and developing a simple, single reflective optical element capable of high–throughput, large scale fabrication of micro- and nano-sized structure templates using holographic lithography. This reflective optical element is then utilized to show proof of concept in fabricating three dimensional structures in negative photoresists as well as tuning subwavelength features in two dimensional compound lattices for the fabrication of dimer and trimer antenna templates. The second aspect focuses on the study of aluminum zinc oxide (AZO), which belongs to recently popularized material class of transparent conducting oxides, capable of tunable plasmonic capabilities in the near-IR regime. Holographic lithography is used to pattern an AZO film with a square lattice array that are shown to form standing wave resonances at the interface of the AZO and the substrate. To demonstrate device level integration the final experiment utilizes AZO patterned gratings and measures the variation of diffraction efficiency as a negative bias is applied to change the AZO optical properties. Additionally efforts to understand the behavior of these structures through optical measurements is …