Optical photonic crystals fabricated from colloidal systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel ceramic fabrication method for optical photonic crystals using colloidal systems, achieving simultaneous sphere ordering and titania network formation, with reflectance properties scaling with sphere size.

Contribution

Introduces a new ceramic technique for fabricating photonic crystals that combines sphere ordering and network formation in a single step.

Findings

Reflectance peak correlates with sphere size

Photonic crystals show uniform color at the first stop band

Wavelength scales well with sphere size

Abstract

Photonic crystals of close-packed arrays of air spheres in a dielectric background of titania have been fabricated with a novel ceramic technique. Unlike previous methods, ordering of the spheres and the formation of the titania network are performed simultaneously. The photonic crystals exhibit a reflectance peak and a uniform color at the position of the first stop band. The wavelength of the reflectance peak scales very well with the sphere size.