We report here far infrared photonic crystals comprised of a lattice-matched pair of semiconductor materials: GaP and Si, or GaAs and Ge, or AlAs and GaAs. The crystals operate in a wavelength range where the real refractive index of one material undergoes a major dispersion associated with the LO and TO phonon absorption peaks. Using electromagnetic theory, we investigated the photonic-bandgap...

Theory of thermal emission from periodic structures. Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. We provide a momentum space formulation for thermal emission f...

In this paper, we report a rapid and facile method for fabricating colloidal photonic crystals inside microchannels of radially symmetric microfluidic chips which were made using soft-lithography. As the suspension of monodisperse silica or polystyrene latex spheres was driven to flow through the channels under the action of centrifugal force, the colloidal spheres were quickly assembled into f...

This paper discusses free carrier generation by pulsed laser fields as a mechanism to switch the optical properties of semiconductor photonic crystals and bulk semiconductors on an ultrafast time scale. Requirements are set for the switching magnitude, the time-scale, the induced absorption as well as the spatial homogeneity, in particular for silicon at λ = 1550 nm. Using a nonlinear absorptio...

Although common in biological systems, synthetic self-assembly routes to complex 3D photonic structures with tailored degrees of disorder remain elusive. Here we show how liquids can be used to finely control disorder in porous 3D photonic crystals, leading to complex and hierarchical geometries. In these optofluidic crystals, dynamically tunable disorder is superimposed onto the periodic optic...

Photonic band gaps can emerge when materials are periodically organized with characteristic dimensions on the order of the wavelength of light. Such materials are commonly known as photonic crystals. Proposed applications for photonic crystals include a wide range of functional optical devices including lowloss optical fibers, three-dimensional waveguides, zero-threshold lasers, sensors, and en...

We review our theoretical and experimental work on functional optical devices based on planar photonic crystals. Beside standard photonic applications, these structures can also be used as building blocks of quantum networks.

A new boundary condition is introduced to calculate the effective impedance matrix of semi-infinite periodic structures such as photonic crystals and metamaterials, which leads to a reduction of the solution space. The obtained effective impedance matrix allows one to relate a matrix to a PC, which includes all of its properties in terms of reflection from its interface. For one-dimensional pho...

We demonstrate the physical mechanism of optical Tamm states using the phase properties of the photonic crystals. Based on such mechanism, we propose an efficient way that can precisely produce optical Tamm states at specific frequencies. Moreover, we show that dielectric photonic crystals and single-negative materials can be effectively connected through their reflection phase. Two kinds of on...

We calculate the low-frequency index of refraction of a medium which is homogeneous along axis z and possesses a periodic dependence of the permittivity epsilon(r) and permeability micro(r) in the x-y plane (2D magnetodielectric photonic crystal). Exact analytical formulas for the effective index of refraction for two eigenmodes with vector E or H polarized along axis z are obtained. We show th...