While the photonic community is occupied with exotic concepts portending a grand future and fame if not fortune, I respectfully entertain the possibility that a humble concept of simply increasing the refractive index by a modest factor may have a far greater payoff in many walks of life. With that in mind, I explore why higher index materials have not yet materialized and point out a few tentative directions for the search of these elusive materials, be they natural or artificial.
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Jacob B. Khurgin (2022) studied this question.
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