Photonic Crystals, Waveguide and Devices
The more general area of photonic crystals in the visible
and near-IR
wavelength ranges was
originally pioneered by the theoretical
work of
Eli Yablonovitch and Sajeev John in 1987. In 1992, we microfabricated
the first
three-dimensional photonic crystals with Eli Yablonovitch’s
design in the near-IR wavelength
range.
More recently, we have designed
and constructed devices based on the dispersion characteristics of
photonic
crystals.
One of these devices was a “superprism” that could be
used to sort light by wavelength much in the same way as a refractive
optical prism does. The large dispersion in the superprism enables this
frequency-selective device to be miniaturized into a length of less than
a millimeter,
and methods for low-loss coupling into and out of the superprism are described in this paper.
