Unconventional light scattering from glassy photonic films and metasurfaces

TL;DR

This paper investigates how introducing anisotropic orientational disorder in glassy photonic structures causes unconventional light scattering, revealing an interplay between order and disorder that affects the resulting optical patterns.

Contribution

It demonstrates both experimentally and theoretically that light scattering in these structures can be understood through the intersection points of rods, highlighting a novel interplay between order and disorder.

Findings

Disordered patterns can remain bright and sharp despite increasing disorder.

Ordered structures can produce disordered scattering patterns.

Light scattering is governed by the intersection points of rods.

Abstract

The propagation of light through a random medium is an important problem in photonics. When the random fluctuations of the orientation for individual rods were introduced to the ideal woodpile photonic structure, a crossover from Laue diffraction to randomly scattered fields which is similar in appearance to speckle patterns was observed and investigated. Unexpected interplay between order and disorder was discovered from anisotropic glassy samples when orientational disorder was added only in one direction of square woodpile structure. It is found that the ordered sets of rods produced disordered patterns and vice versa the disordered sets of rods produced ordered patterns that continue to be bright and sharp with increasing disorder. To explain this effect, it was demonstrated theoretically and experimentally that the light scattering can be described purely in terms of the intersection points of the rods.