Abstract Note | Over the last few decades, the quantum aspects of light have been explored and major progress has been made in understanding the specific quantum aspects of the interaction between light and matter. Single photons are now routinely produced by single molecules on surfaces, vacancies in crystals, and quantum dots. The micrometre and nanometre scale is also the privileged range where fluctuations of electromagnetic fields manifest themselves through the Casimir force. The domain of classical optics has recently seen many exciting new developments, especially in the areas of nano-optics, nano-antennas, metamaterials, and optical cloaking. Approaches based on single-molecule detection and plasmonics have provided new avenues for exploring light–matter interaction at the nanometre scale. All these topics have in common a trend to consider and use smaller and smaller objects, down to the micrometre, nanometre, and even atomic range, a region where one gradually passes from classical physics to quantum physics. The summer school held in Les Houches in July 2013 treated all these subjects lying at the frontier between nanophotonics and quantum optics, in a series of lectures given by world experts in the domain and gathered together in the present volume |