Solid state theoretical methods for defect computations in Photonic Crystals

Abstract

We present an efficient approach for computing the optical properties of defect structures embedded in Photonic Crystals. This approach is based on an expansion of the electromagnetic field into optimally localized photonic Wannier functions and maximally utilizes the information of the underlying Photonic Crystals available from photonic bandstructure computations. While we demonstrate the efficiency of this approach by considering several defect structures for TM-polarized radiation in two-dimensional Photonic Crystals, the approach itself can easily be extended to the case of TE-polarization and three-dimensional Photonic Crystals.