  Modern optical systems are subject to very restrictive performance, size and
cost requirements. Especially in portable systems size often is the most
important factor, which necessitates elaborate designs to achieve the desired
specifications. However, current designs already operate very close to the
physical limits and further progress is difficult to achieve by changing only
the complexity of the design. Another way of improving the performance is to
tailor the optical properties of materials specifically to the application at
hand. A class of novel, customizable materials that enables the tailoring of
the optical properties, and promises to overcome many of the intrinsic
disadvantages of polymers, are nanocomposites. However, despite considerable
past research efforts, these types of materials are largely underutilized in
optical systems. To shed light into this issue we, in this paper, discuss how
nanocomposites can be modeled using effective medium theories. In the second
part, we then investigate the fundamental requirements that have to be
fulfilled to make nanocomposites suitable for optical applications, and show
that it is indeed possible to fabricate such a material using existing methods.
Furthermore, we show how nanocomposites can be used to tailor the refractive
index and dispersion properties towards specific applications.
