Light interaction with natural photonic crystal from band gap structure to possible light localization phenomena

Abstract

Nature exhibited beautiful optical phenomena when the light interacts with special organic materials. Complex natural nanostructures have been unwrapped from age ago to develop specific functions, between them are physics behavior that are waiting to be understood. The structures that conform these natural systems are so sophisticated that in our time they are the reason to start research work in this new field of knowledge, it implies the combination of scientific knowledge from diverse areas. Here, we start our study with the optical and structural characterization of the wing samples of Quesada gigas, Greta oto, and Morpho cypris. There are three native species from South America that exhibit structural color on the surface of their wings known as iridescence, this optical effect is attributed to photonic structure arrays inside the samples [1] (Vukusic and Sambles, 2003). Our focus in this work is to understand how the structural disorder influences the light interaction with the natural photonic systems. In order to obtain this goal, interferometric measurements using spatiotemporal resolution were done, and experimental and computational methods were implemented too. Our results offer promissory evidence for the light localization in natural photonic systems when structural disorder is present in the studied system. Therefore, in this work we suggest one way to detect light localization in natural photonic structures with the purpose to establish a correlation between optical effect and structural array in natural systems.