Modal expansions in periodic photonic systems with material loss and dispersion

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical framework for studying the bandstructure of periodic photonic systems with lossy and dispersive materials, enabling accurate analysis of complex optical properties and their perturbations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using adjoint modes to handle material dispersion and loss, providing exact expressions for bandstructure derivatives and density of states in 3D periodic systems.

Findings

Derived exact formulas for complex group velocity and density of states.

Validated the framework with lossless dielectric systems with Lorentzian resonances.

Showed how resonant perturbations modify bandstructure in dispersive photonic systems.

Abstract

We study bandstructure properties of periodic optical systems composed of lossy and intrinsically dispersive materials. To this end, we develop an analytical framework based on adjoint modes of a lossy periodic electromagnetic system and show how the problem of linearly dependent eigenmodes in the presence of material dispersion can be overcome. We then formulate expressions for the bandstructure derivative $(\partial \omega) / (\partial \mathbf{k})$ (complex group velocity) and the local and total density of transverse optical states. Our exact expressions hold for 3D periodic arrays of materials with arbitrary dispersion properties and in general need to be evaluated numerically. They can be generalized to systems with two, one or no directions of periodicity provided the fields are localized along non-periodic directions. Possible applications are photonic crystals, metamaterials, metasurfaces composed of highly dispersive materials such as metals or lossless photonic crystals, metamaterials or metasurfaces strongly coupled to resonant perturbations such as quantum dots or excitons in 2D materials. For illustration purposes, we analytically evaluate our expressions for some simple systems consisting of lossless dielectrics with one sharp Lorentzian material resonance. Finally, we show how the perturbation of a periodic system with a sharp resonance modifies the bandstructure. By combining several Lorentz poles, this provides an avenue to perturbatively treat quite general material loss bands in photonic crystals.