Engineering Light: Dispersion in Polymer Photonic Crystals

Abstract

The circuits of the future will be optical, capable of transmitting information with larger bandwidths and more efficiency than the electronic circuits that currently connect our world. Photonic crystals (PhCs), synthetically fabricated materials with a periodically alternating dielectric lattice, can control the behavior of incident light based on their photonic band structure, or dispersion contour. The physical structure of PhCs can be tuned via dispersion engineering to selectively change their light guiding properties, an exciting phenomenon that will make optical circuits a reality. A process flow for the nanofabrication of polymer PhCs and a new spectroscopic setup to characterize their dispersion contours is presented. This setup will enable the first measurements of the full photonic band structure of polymer PhCs to better understand the link between chemical structure and photon dispersion.