Photonic Crystals with Controlled Disorder

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to controllably add disorder to photonic crystals via vacancies, enabling the study of disorder effects on their transport properties and potential new physics and applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to introduce and control disorder in photonic crystals through vacancy creation, expanding possibilities for research and applications.

Findings

Controlled disorder affects transport properties

Vacancy percentage influences scattering and diffusion

Method enables new physics exploration in photonic materials

Abstract

Photonic crystals are extremely sensitive to structural disorder even to the point of completely losing their functionalities. While on one side this can be detrimental for applications in traditional optical devices, on the other side, it gives also rise to very interesting new physics and maybe even new applications. We propose a route to introduce disorder in photonic crystals in a controlled way, by creating a certain percentage of vacancies in the lattice. We show how the method works and what type of materials can be obtained this way. Also we characterize the resulting transport properties from various points of view, including measurements of the transport and scattering mean free path and the diffusion constant.