Solid state theory meets photonics: The curious optical properties of photonic crystals

Abstract

The past decades have seen dramatic advances in microstructuring technology. Today, a wide variety of structures with feature sizes ranging from a couple of micrometers all the way down to a few tens of nanometers are routinely fabricated with precision better than ten nanometers. In addition to these improvements in fabrication quality, the variety of materials that can be processed is growing continuously. These advances in materials science are paralleled by the development of novel and improvement of existing laser sources that allows one to generate electromagnetic fields with previously unattainable energy densities as well as temporal and spatial coherences. Bringing together advanced microfabrication technologies with sophisticated laser systems lies at the heart of Nano-Photonics: The control over the flow of light on length scales of the wavelength of light itself through microstructured optical materials (“photonic metamaterials”) with carefully designed properties.