Improving unrestricted imaging quality of a triangular lattice photonic crystal slab by modifying surface configuration

We propose a photonic crystal (PC) structure only by replacing square lattice Luo et al. (2002) 12]] with triangular lattice to obtain an unrestricted imaging. Equal-frequency contours (EFCs) analysis shows that this triangular lattice two-dimensional PC exhibits an effective isotropic refractive index n_eff=−1 at a normalized frequency ω=0.291×2πc/a. Imaging quality of this triangular lattice PC slab involving both power intensity and full-width at half-maximum intensity of the image is studied using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation. In order to achieve a high-quality image, an appropriate surface termination is chosen. In addition, by adjusting the surface air-hole radius of the PC slab, the imaging quality can be further improved. Coupled-mode theory analysis shows that the optimized surface termination and the adjusted surface air-hole can excite two kinds of surface modes that can couple with the Bloch wave in the PC. With the help of these surface modes, both the intensity of image and the super-resolution capacity of this triangular lattice PC slab can be improved greatly.