Non-Rayleigh distribution of reflected intensity from photonic crystals with disorder

TL;DR

This study investigates how structural disorder in photonic crystals affects reflected light intensity, revealing deviations from classical Rayleigh statistics and highlighting the interplay between order and disorder.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental analysis of reflected intensity statistics in photonic crystals with varying degrees of disorder, showing deviations from Rayleigh distribution.

Findings

Deviations from Rayleigh distribution increase with long-range order.

Disorder influences the statistical properties of reflected light.

Experimental evidence of interplay between order and disorder in photonic media.

Abstract

Structural disorder results in multiple scattering in real photonic crystals, which have been widely used for applications and studied for fundamental interests. The interaction of light with such complex photonic media is expected to show interplay between disorder and order. For a completely disordered medium, the intensity statistics is well-known to obey Rayleigh statistics with a negative exponential distribution function, corresponding to absence of correlations. Intensity statistics is unexplored however for complex media with both order and disorder. We study experimentally the intensity statistics of light reflected from photonic crystals with various degree of disorder. We observe deviations from the Rayleigh distribution and the deviations increase with increasing long-range order.