Holographic assembly of quasicrystalline photonic heterostructures

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the holographic assembly of dielectric quasicrystalline heterostructures with engineered defects, revealing their unique optical properties and potential for fundamental studies in soft matter physics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel holographic method to assemble complex 2D and 3D quasicrystalline structures with engineered defects.

Findings

Successful fabrication of 2D and 3D quasicrystalline heterostructures

Structures exhibit large photonic bandgaps

Provides model systems for studying transport and phase transitions

Abstract

Quasicrystals have a higher degree of rotational and point-reflection symmetry than conventional crystals. As a result, quasicrystalline heterostructures fabricated from dielectric materials with micrometer-scale features exhibit interesting and useful optical properties including large photonic bandgaps in two-dimensional systems. We demonstrate the holographic assembly of two-dimensional and three-dimensional dielectric quasicrystalline heterostructures, including structures with specifically engineered defects. The highly uniform quasiperiodic arrays of optical traps used in this process also provide model aperiodic potential energy landscapes for fundamental studies of transport and phase transitions in soft condensed matter systems.