TM-like and TE-like Modes Coupling in a Two-Dimensional Photonic Crystal Slab Composed of Truncated Cone Silicon Rods

We numerically investigate the coupling of TE-like modes and TM-like modes in a two-dimensional （2D） photonic crystal （PC） slab composed of truncated cone silicon rods. In such structures, the classification of TE-like modes and TM-like modes is generally impossible and the coupling occurs due to vertical structural asymmetries. The frequency and wavevector dependences of the mode coupling are discussed by investigating the photonic band structures, and the coupling efficiency is studied by examining the transmittance. The results show that the efficiency of mode conversion is strengthened by the vertical asymmetry and weakened by the clear sinall gap. These structures could be used as polarization conversion devices in integrated optics.     

Investigation of Ag2O Thermal Decomposition by Terahertz Time-Domain Spectroscopy

Application of terahertz time-domain spectroscopy is demonstrated to study the process of Ag2O thermal decomposition. In the process of decomposition, the time-resolved signals are characterized by broad oscillations and decreased intensity, and Tttz pulse essentially contains two broad spectral components： one centered at around 0.35 THz and a band with a maximum at around 0.81 THz shift to 0.71 THz. Optical absorption spectra of different specimens are studied in the frequency range 0.3-1.4 THz and the data are analyzed by the relevant theory of the effective medium approach combined with the Drude-Lorentz model. The analysis suggests that optical properties stem from the Drude term for the metallic phase and the Lorentz term for the insulator phase in the complex system.     

Transmission Properties of One-Dimensional Photonic Crystals Containing Anisotropic Metamaterials

The transmission properties of one-dimensional photonie crystals （1DPCs） containing anisotropic metamaterials are theoretically studied. It is shown that the 1DPCs can possess a similar zero average index （zero-n） gaps, the edges of zero-~ gap are weakly dependent on the incident angles, scale length and the polarization of the electromagnetic wave. When an impurity is introduced, a defect mode appears inside the zeron gap with a very weak dependence on incident angles and sealing. It is found that in such photonic crystals, a transmitted Gaussian pulse with its carrier frequency lying in the lower gap edge, in the defect mode and in the bandgap, can experience a positive or negative group delay and hence a subluminal, ultra.slow or superluminal propagation with small distortions. These properties of the photonic crystals have potential applications in the transfer of information.     

Photonic resonant transmission in the quantum-well structure of photonic crystals

A photonic quantum-well is constructed by sandwiching a uniform medium between two photonic barriers due to the photonic band gap mismatch, similar to electronic quantum well. The transmission coefficient is calculated by a plane-wave expansion method in combination with multiple-scattering techniques. The transmission peaks indicate that some photonic states exist in a quantized way, satisfying a quantized frequency relation. We also show that the finite photonic potential barrier plays different confined roles on the different photonic levels. The positions and number of the resonant peaks can be artificially tuned by varying the well width. By appropriately choosing the parameters of the well and barrier, a high-quality multichannel filtering can be achieved.     

Structure Tuning of Line-Defect Waveguides Based on Silicon-on-Insulator Photonic Crystal Slabs

We present fabrication and experimental measurement of a series of photonic crystal waveguides. The complete devices consist of an injector taper down from 3 μm into a triangular-lattice air-hole single-line-defect waveguide with lattice constant from 410nm to 470nm and normalized radius 0.31. We fabricate these devices on a silicon- on-insulator substrate and characterize them using a t unable laser source over a wavelength range from 1510 nm to 1640nm. A sharp attenuation at photonic crystal waveguide mode edge is observed for most structures. The edge of guided band is shifted about 30nm with the 10nm increase of the lattice constant, We obtain high-efficiency light propagation and broad flat spectrum response of the photonic crystal waveguides.     

Tunable Pair Transmission in One-Dimensional Photonic Crystals Consisting of Single-Negative Materials

We study the transmission of one-dimensional photonic crystals consisting of single-negative permittivity and single-negative permeability media by using transfer matrix method. A pair of transmission modes is found in the gap. The transmission modes are dependent only on the ratio of the thicknesses of the two alternating layers. The separation of a pair of transmission modes can be tuned by varying the thickness of the defect layer or the ratio of thicknesses of the two alternating layers.     

Enlargement of complete two-dimensional band gap by using photonic crystal heterostructure

A two-dimensional photonic crystal heterostructure, which consists of two photonic crystals of a square lattice of circular columns with reverse dielectric configurations, is proposed. Photonic band gap properties are calculated using a plane-wave method and the transmission spectra are obtained. After optimization, the relative width of the complete band gap reached 13.8% based on the simple unit-cell shape and crystal lattice. The photonic crystal heterostructure opens up new ways of engineering photonic band gap materials and designing photonic crystal devices.     

Numerical test of the theory of pseudo-diffusive transmission at the Dirac point of a photonic band structure

It has recently been predicted that a conical singularity (=Dirac point) in the band structure of a photonic crystal produces an unusual 1/L scaling of the photon flux transmitted through a slab of thickness L. This inverse-linear scaling is unusual, because it is characteristic of radiative transport via diffusion modes through a disordered medium - while here it appears for propagation of Bloch modes in an ideal crystal without any disorder. We present a quantitative numerical test of the predicted scaling, by calculating the scattering of transverse-electric (TE) modes by a two-dimensional triangular lattice of dielectric rods in air. We verify the 1/L scaling and show that the slope differs by less than 10% from the value predicted for maximal coupling of the Bloch modes in the photonic crystal to the plane waves in free space.     

Experimental determination of the band structure of photonic crystals of colloidal silica spheres

A photonic band structure of colloidal crystals of silica spheres is analytically determined by a band model with three fitting parameters: the sphere size, the effective refractive index, and the band-gap. Optical properties of the crystals annealed at various temperatures were characterized by a procedure similar to X-ray diffraction technique, and the width of photonic band-gap measured from the transmission spectra experimentally servers as an additional check on the validation of the model. The photonic band structures defined by the band-gap, the refractive index, and the Brillouin zone are obviously superior to the use of the Bragg's expression involving simple zone folding.     

Independent Modulation of Omnidirectional Defect Modes in Single-Negative Materials Photonic Crystal with Multiple Defects

Single-negative materials based on photonic crystal with multiple defect layers are designed and the free modulation of defect modes is studied. The results show that the multi-defect structure can avoid the interference between the defect states. Therefore, the designed double defect modes in the zero effective-phase gap can be adjusted independently by changing the thickness of different defect layers. In addition, the two tunable defect modes have the omnidirectional characteristics. This multi-defect structure with above-mentioned two advantages has potential applications in modern optical devices such as tunable omnidirectional filters.     

A Novel Woodpile Three-Dimensional Terahertz Photonic Crystal

A novel woodpile lattice structure is proposed. Based on plane wave expansion （PWE） method, the complete photonic band gaps （PBGs） of the novel woodpile three~dimensional （3D） terahertz （THz） photonic crystal （PC） with a decreasing symmetry relative to a face-centred-tetragonal （fct） symmetry are optimized by varying some structural parameters and the highest band gap ratio can reach 27.61%. Compared to the traditional woodpile lattice, the novel woodpile lattice has a wider range of the filling ratios to gain high quality PBGs, which provides greater convenience for the manufacturing process. The novel woodpile 3D PC will be very promising for materials of THz Junctional components.     

Bloch oscillations for circularly polarized light

All previous investigations on the Bloch oscillations of waves focus on scalar waves. Here we demonstrate, for the first time, the existence of Bloch oscillations of vector fields for circularly polarized light (CPL) propagating through a designed liquid crystal structure. To obtain the Wannier-Stark ladder of the CPL, we have designed a cholesteric liquid crystal structure with spatially varying pitch. The Bloch oscillations of the CPL have been observed in such a structure by exact numerical simulations. We have also shown that such a phenomenon can be easily detected in time-resolved reflection experiments.     

Photonic band gap properties of GaP opals with a new topology

In this paper, we propose that the “anomalous” optical response exhibited by GaP and InP infiltrated opals is due to the peculiar morphology shown by these materials when grown within the pores. In order to account for their optical response, we propose a new structural model consisting of a network of high dielectric spheres located in the pores of the bare opal, interconnected by cylinders of the same material. A fair agreement between the theoretical predictions using this model and the experimental measurements has been found. We also show that the inverse structure presents very interesting optical properties.     

Demonstration of a new transport regime of photon in two-dimensional photonic crystal

A new transport regime of photon in two-dimensional photonic crystal near the Dirac point has been demonstrated by exact numerical simulation. In this regime, the conductance of photon is inversely proportional to the thickness of sample, which can be described by Dirac equation very well. Both of bulk and surface disorders always reduce the transmission, which is in contrast to the previous theoretical prediction that they increase the conductance of electron at the Dirac point of graphene. However, regular tuning of interface structures can cause the improvement of photon conductance. Furthermore, large conductance fluctuations of photon have also been observed, which is similar to the case of electron in graphene.     

Nonperturbative analysis of spontaneous emission in one dimensional special photonic crystals

The retarded spontaneous emission (SpE) process of a two-level atom embedded in realistic one dimensional photonic crystals (1DPC) is investigated with the quantum nonperturbative theory. The atomic transient decay is divided into two processes: the first comes from the natural decay to free space and the second is induced by the reflected field emitted from the atom itself. Due to the multi-reflection in the multi-layer structure, the correct delay time of the induced decay process is hard to calculate in the usual ways. However with the special but practical 1DPC provided, we give the analytic result of the atomic dynamic decay in 1DPC. Our result gives a clear picture to show the process which the atom feels the surrounding.     

Optical properties of subwavelength metallic-dielectric multilayers

We present studies on the optical properties of periodic metallic-dielectric (MD) multilayers and numerical results show that there exists, insensitive to the lattice scaling, a transparent band as long as the layer thickness is in the subwavelength ranging. It illustrates the transparent band is controlled by mechanisms beyond the Bragg scattering: the shorter-wavelength band edge comes from the intensive resonant absorption behavior of the metals, while the longer-wavelength band edge is determined by zero (volume) averaged permittivity εeff=0. Moreover, a Lorentz-Drude model for the permittivity of a ε-negative (ENG) metamaterial is used to show that a transparent band may be obtained in a subwavelength structure consisting of ENG multilayers with total length less than both the center wavelength and the half width of the band.     

The Sommerfeld precursor in photonic crystals

We calculate the Sommerfeld precursor that results after transmission of a generic electromagnetic plane wave pulse with transverse electric polarization, through a one-dimensional rectangular N-layer photonic crystal with two slabs per layer. The shape of this precursor equals the shape of the precursor that would result from transmission through a homogeneous medium. However, amplitude and period of the precursor are now influenced by the spatial average of the plasma frequency squared instead of the plasma frequency squared for the homogeneous case.     

Photonic Band Gap Properties of Three-Dimensional SiO2 Photonic Crystals

Three-dimensional SiO2 photonic crystals （PhCs） are fabricated on quartz substrates by the vertical deposition method. Scanning electron microscopy measurement reveals that the samples exhibit an ordered close-packed arrangement of SiO2 spheres. It is found that the position of the [111] photonie band gap （PBG） shifts to a long wavelength （red shift） with increasing sphere size. Gap broadening effects are observed due to the presence of defects in the samples. Moreover, the optical properties of the PBG are very sensitive to the annealing temperature. Our results indicate that the optical properties of the PBG can be easily tuned in the visible region by appropriate experimental parameters, which will be useful for practical applications of PhC optical devices.     

Efficient transmission in cascaded photonic crystal waveguides via a strong coupling effect

A design of cascaded photonic crystal waveguide is proposed in this paper inspired by the work of Tang et al. [D. Tang, L. Chen, W. Ding, Appl. Phys. Lett. 89 (2006) 131120]. In contrast to a conventional waveguide source, a plane wave source is applied in the current design. We show that an efficient guide mode in the photonic band gap can be achieved. The same idea also works for a slight variation by defects introduction in the photonic crystal. Finally, the strong coupling effect present in the cascaded waveguides is demonstrated by an analogy with photonic quantum wells.