Tiles of non-moiré photonic structures for tailoring the light path with multi-channel waveguiding and beam steering

Abstract

Contours of trigonometric functions form an interesting tessellation known as Non-Moiré (NM) tiles. We realize that the proposed NM tiles themselves serve as an efficient photonic crystal waveguide, in which some of the eigenmodes are guided modes. The waveguiding mechanism in NM tiles is due to both the photonic bandgap and index guiding. Depending on the electromagnetic source’s position, a combination of several NM tiles emulates various beam steering functionalities including multi-channel waveguiding, beam-splitting, and Mach–Zehnder type beam-combining applications. The reported tiles are scalable to all electromagnetic frequencies so that one can realize design-free waveguides for engineering the light path in photonic circuits.