The fabrication of fully three-dimensional photonic crystals with a bandgap at optical wavelengths is demonstrated by way of direct femtosecond laser writing of an organic-inorganic hybrid material with metal-binding moieties, and selective silver coating using electroless plating. The crystals have 600-nm intralayer periodicity and sub-100 nm features, and they exhibit well-defined diffraction...

Photonic bandgap (PBG) structures have remarkable optical properties that can be exploited for biosensing applications. We describe the fabrication of 1-D PBG biosensors using porous silicon. The optical properties of porous silicon PBGs are sensitive to small changes of refractive index in the porous layers, which makes them a good sensing platform capable of detecting binding of the target mo...

Block copolymers self-assemble into one-, two-, and three-dimensional periodic equilibrium structures, which can exhibit photonic bandgaps. This paper outlines a methodology for producing photonic crystals at optical length scales from block copolymers. Techniques for enhancing the intrinsic dielectric contrast between the block copolymer domains, as well as increasing the characteristic microd...

The limiting efficiency of photovoltaic energy conversion was determined by Shockley and Queisser using the theory of detailed balance, which described the balance between absorption and emission of photons. However, when a material is placed on top of a solar cell that modifies the transmission of photons (e.g., a photonic crystal), both the absorption and emission of photons are modified. Her...

In this paper we propose a time-variant photonic crystal, which can be formed by a stream of wave-length-scale microdroplets flowing through a microfluidic channel. The functionality stems from the photonic bandgap generated from the 1D periodic perturbation of refractive index. The periodicity, volume fraction and composition of both the dispersed and the continuous phases can be conveniently ...

The waveguiding properties of two silica-based airguiding photonic bandgap fiber designs are investigated with special emphasis on material effects. The nonlinear coefficients are found to be 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller than those obtained in index-guiding microstructured fibers with large mode areas. The material dispersion of silica makes a significant contribution to the total chromatic ...

We study theoretically and observe experimentally polychromatic gap solitons generated by supercontinuum light in an array of optical waveguides. The solitons are formed through a sharp transition from diffraction-induced broadening and color separation to the simultaneous spatio-spectral localization of supercontinuum light inside the photonic bandgap with the formation of the characteristic s...

A novel polarizer made from two-dimensional photonic bandgap materials was demonstrated theoretically. This polarizer is fundamentally different from the conventional ones. It can function in a wide frequency range with high performance and the size can be made very compact, which renders it usefully as a micropolarizer in microoptics.

Optical radiation properties of a single atom have been among the most popular research problems in quantum optics since the early years. In contrast to classical intuition, the quantum theory asserts that the optical radiation properties are not wholly determined by the intrinsic characteristics of the atom but also depend on the electromagnetic mode structure seen by the atom even when these ...

We demonstrate that photonic superlattices consisting of a periodic distribution of layers of materials with positive index of refraction and photonic crystal slabs that, at the operating frequency, have negative effective index of refraction present a photonic gap that corresponds to the frequency at which the spatial average of the refractive index distribution, taken over the unit supercell ...