Thin-film coated opals-an approach to 3-dimensional photonic crystals

摘要

Summary form only given. Synthetic opal provides a 3D template for the formation of photonic crystals for visible light operation. Improvement of the photonic bandgap structure of opal has been approached via coating the inner surface of the opal with TiO/sub 2/, InP or GaP layers using CVD and MOCVD. In contrast to other methods of embedding high refractive index materials in opal these methods allow the crystallinity of the original template to be preserved. The high refractive index coating serves to increase the width of the photonic stop-band and to squeeze the angular dispersion of the stop-band.