Physics and applications of photonic crystals

Abstract

We first fabricated a dielectric based layer-by-layer photonic crystal, with a three-dimensional photonic band gap at microwave frequencies. We investigated the transmission, reflection and defect characteristics of the crystal. A Fabry-Perot cavity analogy was used to understand the localization of the electromagnetic (EM) fields around defects. We then showed the enhancement of the EM held within the defect volumes, and suggested a possible application: resonant cavity enhanced detectors built around photonic crystals. We demonstrated that a detector inserted inside the defect volume benefits from the frequency selectivity and the highly enhanced field of the cavity. Next, we investigated the radiation of the EM fields from a source inserted in the defect volume, and observed that the radiated field has a very high directivity and efficiency. The experimental results agreed well with the theoretical expectations. We demonstrated waveguiding structures built around photonic crystals. We showed that EM waves could be guided through a planar air gap between two photonic crystals, in which the wave is coupled inside the defect volume, and having no where else to go, propagates through this opening. The dispersion diagrams for these planar waveguide structures also agreed well with the theoretical expectations of our waveguide model. We also showed that, the wave could be guided along a single missing rod, and demonstrated the bending of the EM waves for these waveguide structures with “L” shaped openings. We tested metallic photonic crystals built in different dimensions and diflferent filling ratios. We observed many superiorities of these structures when compared to dielectric-based photonic crystals. A full characterisation of various metallic photonic crystals was performed. We also showed that metallic photonic crystals are suitable for some of the applications we have demonstrated for dielectric structures. We also fabricated a new layer-by-layer photonic crystal using highly doped silicon wafers processed by semiconductor micromachining techniques, with a band gap at millimeter wave frequencies. We showed that the transmission and defect characteristics of these structures are analogous to metallic photonic crystals, as we have predicted. The experimental results agree well with the predictions of the transfer matrix method (TMM) simulations. The method can be extended to fabricate these crystals at THz. frequencies.