A plain photonic crystal for generating directional radiation from embedded sources

Abstract

We investigate experimentally the generation of highly directional radiation from a plain two-dimensional photonic crystal structure where an embedded source couples to a photonic crystal band having Bloch modes of even symmetry and negative group velocity. No modification is made to the crystal structure. By virtue of recent studies employing corrugated surface modes, this may be a viable method for generating directional radiation for antenna applications.