Optical properties of carbon nanofiber photonic crystals

TL;DR

This paper investigates the optical properties of carbon nanofiber photonic crystals, revealing how their symmetry and band structure can be characterized through ellipsometry and polarization analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze the optical properties and band structure of CNF photonic crystals using polarization considerations in ellipsometry.

Findings

Refractive index of CNF fibers is 4.1.

Symmetry directions and band structure can be extracted from polarization data.

Fabrication of various lattice patterns of CNF demonstrated.

Abstract

Carbon nanofibers (CNF) are used as components of planar photonic crystals. Square and rectangular lattices and random patterns of vertically aligned CNF were fabricated and their properties studied using ellipsometry. We show that detailed information such as symmetry directions and the band structure of these novel materials can be extracted from considerations of the polarization state in the specular beam. The refractive index of the individual nanofibers was found to be n_CNF = 4.1.