Plasmonic and Photonic Crystals

Abstract

In the last years, photonic crystals gained much attention and various new designs have been discussed. To create useful optoelectronic devices, sophisticated structures and hybrid devices consisting of dielectric and organic media combined with highly conductive materials such as metals have to be engineered. In the first part of this chapter, we discuss various designs of photonic crystals including distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs) and organic microcavities, exhibiting high-quality photonic cavity modes. In a next step, the challenge of combining highly absorptive metallic layers with DBRs or organic microcavities is discussed. As a consequence of the interaction of the photonic cavity mode with the metallic structures, new hybridized modes—so-called Tamm plasmon-polaritons (TPPs)—can be observed. Higher-dimensional functionality of hybrid photonic crystals can be realized by periodically structuring the metal layer. The structuring leads to a strong confinement of the fields which is evident from a clear discretization of the modes. Additionally, surface plasmon-polaritons (SPPs) are excited, propagating at the interface between the silver and the adjacent dielectric layers. Modes up to very high order numbers are detectable as quasi-linear periodic lines in the dispersion pattern. Finally, the coherence properties of the devices are discussed, including periodic arrays of localized cavity modes and metal-based Tamm plasmons.