Refraction In Photonic Crystals Research Articles

Wide-angle beam splitting by use of positive–negative refraction in photonic crystals

We present a positive-negative refraction effect in which, under certain conditions, an incident plane wave launched into a photonic crystal excites a positive-refracted Bloch wave and a negative-refracted Bloch wave simultaneously, both of which maintain the polarization. By utilizing this phenomenon, wide-angle beam splitting can be realized at the microscale level. Numerical simulations are employed to demonstrate this anomalous refraction behavior.

Negative refraction in photonic crystals

We demonstrate that light propagation in strongly modulated 2D/3D photonic crystals (PhCs) becomes refraction-like in the vicinity of the photonic bandgap, which is contrary to the fact that light propagation in weakly modulated PhCs is very different from refraction and thus the definition of refraction index becomes meaningless. Such a crystal behaves like a material having an effective refractive index controllable by the band structure. This situation is analogous to the effective-mass approximation in electron-band theory. The propagation states having a negative effective index exhibit unusual properties, such as mirror-like imaging effect, image-transfer effect. These properties are confirmed by finite-difference time-domain simulations.