Large Frequency Range of Photonic Band Gaps on Porous Silicon Heterostructures for Infrared Applications

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates theoretically that large infrared photonic band gaps can be achieved using porous silicon heterostructures by stacking multiple photonic crystal substructures with different lattice periods, enabling tunable giant band gaps.

Contribution

It introduces a simple analytical method to design large photonic band gaps in porous silicon heterostructures by combining multiple substructures with different periods.

Findings

Large infrared band gaps are theoretically achievable in porous silicon heterostructures.

Stacking multiple photonic crystal substructures broadens the forbidden band gap.

A simple analytical rule guides the design of giant photonic band gaps.

Abstract

In this work we show theoretically that it is possible to design a large band gap in the infrared range using a one-dimensional Photonic Crystal heterostructure made of porous silicon. Stacking together multiple photonic crystal substructures of the same contrast index, but of different lattice periods, it is possible to broad the narrow forbidden band gap that can be reached by the low contrast index of the porous silicon multilayers. The main idea in this work is that we can construct a Giant Photonic Band Gap -as large as desired- by combining a tandem of photonic crystals substructures by using a simple analytical rule to determine the period of each substructure.