Abstract
Localization of light is the photon analog of electron localization in disordered lattices, for whose discovery Anderson received the Nobel prize in 1977. The question about its existence in open three-dimensional materials has eluded an experimental and full theoretical verification for decades. Here we study numerically electromagnetic vector wave transmittance through realistic digital representations of hyperuniform dielectric networks, a new class of highly correlated but disordered photonic band gap materials. We identify the evanescent decay of the transmitted power in the gap and diffusive transport far from the gap. Near the gap, we find that transport sets off diffusive but, with increasing slab thickness, crosses over gradually to a faster decay, signaling localization. We show that we can describe the transition to localization at the mobility edge using the self-consistent theory of localization based on the concept of a position-dependent diffusion coefficient.
Highlights
Localization of light is the photon analog of electron localization in disordered lattices, for whose discovery Anderson received the Nobel prize in 1977
We proposed a transport phase diagram for twodimensional hyperuniform disordered photonic bandgap (PBG) materials with a strong Anderson localization (SAL) regime near the PBG30 and conjectured that these findings could be generalized to three dimensions[24,25,26,27,30,31]
This previous work provides a rationale for the existence of a SAL regime in the vicinity of a bandgap of an amorphous photonic material, which we are going to investigate in our work
Summary
Localization of light is the photon analog of electron localization in disordered lattices, for whose discovery Anderson received the Nobel prize in 1977. Imagawa et al reported an increase of the inverse participation ratio near the bandgap of an amorphous diamond structure, which might indicate the presence of localized states[34] This previous work provides a rationale for the existence of a SAL regime in the vicinity of a bandgap of an amorphous photonic material, which we are going to investigate in our work. To this end, we study the transport properties of electromagnetic vector waves in realistic digital representations of threedimensional hyperuniform silicon networks numerically. We find evidence for the anomalous light transport near the band edge, signaling the onset of Anderson localization at a mobility edge and a broad frequency window where light is localized before the bandgap fully develops
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