Abstract
Many butterflies, birds, beetles, and chameleons owe their spectacular colors to the microscopic patterns within their wings, feathers, or skin. When these patterns, or photonic crystals, result in the omnidirectional reflection of commensurate wavelengths of light, it is due to a complete photonic band gap (PBG). The number of natural crystal structures known to have a PBG is relatively small, and those within the even smaller subset of notoriety, including diamond and inverse opal, have proven difficult to synthesize. Here, we report more than 150,000 photonic band calculations for thousands of natural crystal templates from which we predict 351 photonic crystal templates – including nearly 300 previously-unreported structures – that can potentially be realized for a multitude of applications and length scales, including several in the visible range via colloidal self-assembly. With this large variety of 3D photonic crystals, we also revisit and discuss oft-used primary design heuristics for PBG materials.
Highlights
Many butterflies, birds, beetles, and chameleons owe their spectacular colors to the microscopic patterns within their wings, feathers, or skin
When will a 3D crystal possess an omnidirectional photonic band gap (PBG)? By definition, when there exists a range of frequencies which are not transmittable through the crystal due to the interactions of waves moving through media of different permittivity
Our data-driven exploration of the possible space of photonic band gap crystal structures shows that for many photonic crystals, it is clear that no single design rule applies to all PBGs
Summary
Birds, beetles, and chameleons owe their spectacular colors to the microscopic patterns within their wings, feathers, or skin. We report more than 150,000 photonic band calculations for thousands of natural crystal templates from which we predict 351 photonic crystal templates – including nearly 300 previouslyunreported structures – that can potentially be realized for a multitude of applications and length scales, including several in the visible range via colloidal self-assembly With this large variety of 3D photonic crystals, we revisit and discuss oft-used primary design heuristics for PBG materials. The importance of energy localization suggests that the greater the difference in ε of the two regions, the larger the PBG, as this will decrease the similarity between the dielectric and air band These 2D principles are used to understand and design 3D photonic crystals, the terminology of electric and air band has become conventional in 3D PBG crystals.[8]
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