Three-dimensional photonic crystals: superprism, negative refraction, and radiation dynamics

Centre for Ultrahigh-bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems, Centre for Micro-Photonics, Swinburne University of Technology

Friday 11^th November 2005, 3.30PM, Seminar Room AR103, Graduate Research Centre.

The Centre for Micro-Photonics at Swinburne University of Technology is a node of CUDOS and has been undertaking the "3-D photonics crystals" project of CUDOS. The aim of this project is to design, fabricate and characterise photonic crystals and related all-optical devices in polymer materials.

The fabrication methods of this project consist of (a) femtosecond fabrication based on two-photon polymerisation and (b) femtosecond fabrication based on microexplosion. As a result, we have demonstrated the stop gaps at the wavelength of 1.2 mm, which is the shortest wavelength achieved using the two-photon polymerisation technique and recently successfully observed the superprism effect in the woodpile photonic crystal. The results show the great potential of these low refractive index 3-D crystals, fabricated in a very fast and single-step process, to serve directly as functional micro-optical devices in the near infrared wavelength regime. The microexplosion method has been successfully used to generate void channels and dots, which can be stacked as 3-D photonic crystals. The void-channel-based 3-D photonic crystals exhibit the stop gaps up to the fourth orders. It has also been shown that defects can be implemented into a woodpile structure leading transmitted modes in a stop gap. The stop bandgaps can be electrically and optically tuned when liquid crystals are doped in the polymer matrix. These high-quality 3-D photonic crystals have provided a unique opportunity to engineer environments into which luminescent materials (eg. semiconductor quantum dots, QDs) can be introduced so that the interaction between the two can be studied.

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