Photonic crystals with active organic materials.

摘要

The concept of photonic crystals, which involves periodically arranged dielectrics that form a new type of material having novel photonic properties, was first proposed about two decades ago. Since then, a number of applications in photonic technology have been explored. Specifically, organic and hybrid photonic crystals are promising because of the unique advantages of the organic materials.;A one-dimensional (1D) photonic crystal (multilayer) has high reflectance across a certain wavelength range. We report on studies of 1D multilayer polymer films that were fabricated using spin-coating, free film stacking, and co-extrusion techniques. For example, a stack fabricated by placing a laser dye-doped gain medium between two multilayer reflecting polymer films forms a micro-resonator laser or distributed Bragg laser. The resulting laser system is made entirely of plastic and is only several tens of micrometers in thickness.;When the gain, a dye-doped medium, comprises one type of a two-type multilayer film, it results a laser exhibiting distributed feedback. At the edge of the photonic band, the group velocity becomes small and the density of photon states becomes high, which leads to laser emission. Such distributed feedback lasers were fabricated using the co-extrusion technique.;The refractive indices and the photonic lattice determine the photonic band gap, which can be tuned by changing these parameters. Materials with Kerr nonlinearity exhibit a change in refractive index depending on the incident intensity of the light. To demonstrate such switching, electrochemical etching techniques on silicon wafers were used to form two-dimensional (2D) photonic crystals. By incorporating the nonlinear organic material into the 2D structure, we have made all-optical switches. The reflection of a beam from the 2D photonic crystal can be controlled by another beam because it induces a refractive index change in the active material by altering the reflection band. A mid-IR pump-probe experiment was used to observe the Kerr switching effect.;In addition to these photonic crystal topics, nonlinear optical measurements for determining the nonlinear optical response (hyper-Rayleigh scattering and Z-scan) in organic materials are also discussed.