Bounded modes to the rescue of optical transmission

This paper presents a brief survey of the evolution of knowledge about diffraction gratings. After recalling some basic facts, historically and physically, we introduce the concept of Wood anomalies. Next, we present some recent works in order to introduce the role of bounded modes in transmission gratings. The consequences of these recent results are then introduced. This paper is a secondary publication, published in Europhysics News (EPN 38, 3 (2007) 27-31). In the present version, some additional notes have been added with related references.