Optical loss due to intrinsic structural variations of photonic crystals
Abstract
A bottleneck limiting the widespread application of photonic crystals is scattering of light by unavoidable variations in size and position of the crystals' building blocks. We present a new model for both 2 and 3-dimensional photonic crystals that relates the resulting loss length to the magnitude of the variations. The predicted lengths agree well with our experiments on high-quality opals and inverse opals over a wide frequency range, and with literature data analyzed by us. In state-of-the-art structures, control over photons is limited to distances of 50 lattice parameters (~ 15 micron). Consequently, applications of photonic crystals in optical integrated circuits remain a fata morgana, unless an unprecedented reduction of the random variations is achieved.Keywords
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