The physics of light transmission through subwavelength apertures and aperture arrays

The passage of light through apertures much smaller than the wavelength of the light has proved to be a surprisingly subtle phenomenon. This report describes how modern developments in nanofabrication, coherent light sources and numerical vector field simulations have led to the upending of early predictions from scalar diffraction theory and classical electrodynamics. Optical response of real materials to incident coherent radiation at petahertz frequencies leads to unexpected consequences for transmission and extinction of light through subwavelength aperture arrays. This paper is a report on progress in our understanding of this phenomenon over the past decade.