Optical extinction due to intrinsic structural variations of photonic crystals

By A. F. Koenderink, A. Lagendijk, W. Vos. 2004

151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Unavoidable variations in size and position of the building blocks of photonic crystals cause light scattering and extinction of coherent beams. We present a model for both two- and three-dimensional photonic crystals that relates the extinction length to the magnitude of the variations. The predicted lengths agree well with our experiments on high-quality opals and inverse opals, and with literature data analyzed by us. As a result, control over photons is limited to distances up to 50 lattice parameters 15 m in state-of-the-art structures, thereby impeding applications that require large photonic crystals, such as proposed optical integrated circuits. Conversely, scattering in photonic crystals may lead to different physics such as Anderson localization and nonclassical diffusion.

Subfields: Acoustics and Ultrasonics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d83697cd0b5478a857db281baed40a50e6472748

Citations in the corpus

• The physics and applications of random lasers (2008, unknown): “A good definition of a laser is an optical structure or material that satisfies the following two criteria: (1) light is multiply scattered owing to randomness and amplified by stimulated emission, and ( 2 ) there exists a threshold, due to the multiple scattering, above which total gain is larger t”