Recording of periodic variations of amplitude and phase by the interference of coherent laser beams in a hologram offers a natural means for creating one-, two-, and three-dimensional photonic crystals. For device applications such as waveguides in optical communications, one usually needs to create defects in photonic crystals. We present an analysis and an experimental demonstration of a doub...

We exploit the properties of surface electromagnetic waves propagating at the surface of finite one dimensional photonic crystals to improve the performance of optical biosensors with respect to the standard surface plasmon resonance approach. We demonstrate that the hydrogenated amorphous silicon nitride technology is a versatile platform for fabricating one dimensional photonic crystals with ...

We present a new approach for analyzing band structures in one-dimensional Kerr-nonlinear photonic crystals. It combines the finite-difference time-domain method, based on the numerical simulation of oscillating dipole radiation, with the Kerr-nonlinear model. The approach is applied to analyze the band structures in Kerr-nonlinear one-dimensional photonic crystals as a function of the intensit...

We have performed angle-resolved measurements of spontaneous-emission spectra from laser dyes and quantum dots in opal and inverse opal photonic crystals. Pronounced directional dependencies of the emission spectra are observed: angular ranges of strongly reduced emission adjoin with angular ranges of enhanced emission. It appears that emission from embedded light sources is affected both by th...

We describe the fabrication of three-dimensional photonic crystals using a reproducible and reliable procedure consisting of electron beam lithography followed by a sequence of dry etching steps. Careful fabrication has enabled us to define photonic crystals with 280 nm holes defined with 350 nm center to center spacings in GaAsP and GaAs epilayers. We construct these photonic crystals by trans...

In the last two decades, considerable advances have been made in the investigation of nano-photonics in photonic crystals. Previous theoretical investigations of photon dynamics were carried out at zero temperature. Here, we investigate micro/nano cavity photonics in photonic crystals at finite temperature. Due to photonic-band-gap-induced localized long-lived photon dynamics, we discover that ...

The fascinating properties of ionic liquids make it possible to synthesize semiconductor nanostructures via a simple and low-cost electrochemical pathway. The present paper summarizes our recent work on the synthesis of Si, Ge, and SixGe1–x nanostructures from ionic liquids: thin films, nanowires and photonic crystals. We also introduce our first results on the template-assisted electrodepositi...

A new topology optimization algorithm is proposed based on bi-directional evolutionary structural optimization (BESO) method in order to design photonic crystals with maximum band gaps. The optimization process starts from a simple unit cell without band gap, and the photonic crystals are assumed to be periodically composed of two materials with different permittivity. Based on finite element a...

We show theoretically that photonic crystals consisting of colloidal spheres exhibit unidirectional wave propagation and one-way frequency band gaps without breaking time-reversal symmetry via, e.g., the application of an external magnetic field or the use of nonlinear materials. Namely, photonic crystals with low symmetry such as the monoclinic crystal type considered here as well as with unit...