Abstract
Historically, photonic crystals have been made of inorganic high refractive index materials coupled to air voids to maximize the dielectric contrast and in turn the light confinement. However, these systems are complex, costly, and time-demanding, and the fabrication processes are difficult to scale. Polymer structures promise to tackle this issue thanks to their easy solution and melt processing. Unfortunately, their low dielectric contrast limits their performance. In this work, we propose a concise but exhaustive review of the common polymers employed in the fabrication of planar 1D photonic crystals and new approaches to the enhancement of their dielectric contrast. Transfer matrix method modeling will be employed to quantify the effect of this parameter in standardized structures and to propose a new polymer structure for applications dealing with light management.
Highlights
Photonic crystals (PhCs) are sub-micrometric dielectric lattices which are widely used in sensing [1,2,3,4], waveguiding [5,6], signal switching [7], photovoltaics [8,9], lasing [10], and light management in general [11,12,13]
This review focuses on the role of the dielectric contrast in polymer planar photonic crystals
Despite their ease of processing, even at the large scale, and their low cost compared to inorganics, polymeric systems suffer from low dielectric contrast for mutually processable materials
Summary
Photonic crystals (PhCs) are sub-micrometric dielectric lattices which are widely used in sensing [1,2,3,4], waveguiding [5,6], signal switching [7], photovoltaics [8,9], lasing [10], and light management in general [11,12,13]. Bragg reflectors (DBRs) and planar microcavities could represent a paradigm changing approach These structures are easy to fabricate at the laboratory scale via spin-coating [31] or dip-coating [32] and at the very large scale via melt processing with technologies already developed for packaging [33,34,35,36].
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