You can do your own web research to expand on plasmonics, the science surrounding plasmons. There was a good summary in Scientific American by Harry Atwater in 2007. The article is titled "The Promise of Plasmonics."
There are an amazing number of applications; miniature transistors (plasmonsters), cancer treatment, and hazardous material detection, among others. There is even a plasmonic laser, a SPASER, that is theoretically possible, with resolutions 100 times smaller than visible-light lasers. Who knows what else? How many of the current applications of lasers were foreseen when it was first invented?
The downside? Design and manufacture. It will be a while before we see computer chips running at terahertz. However, UC Berkeley reported in Technology Review that they have made some recent progress assembling cheap nanoscale photonic and plasmonic crystals.
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