Photonic crystals with controlled disorder
Published in Physical Review A 84, 023813, 2011
Photonic crystals are extremely sensitive to structural disorder to the point of completely losing their functionalities. While on the one hand this may be detrimental to applications in traditional optical devices, on the other hand it also leads to some very interesting new physics and maybe even new applications. In this publication, we propose a route to introduce disorder in photonic crystals in a controlled way by creating a certain percentage of vacancies in the crystal lattice. We show how the method works and what kind of materials can be obtained in this way. In addition, we use this system to test the role of disorder in the resulting transport properties from various viewpoints, including measurements of the transport and scattering mean free path and the diffusion constant.