Abstract

Materials that exhibit a full photonic band gap within a certain frequency range open the possibility of studying new physics within the gap. The concept of a three- dimensional photonic band structure was introduced by Yablonovitch as an extension of a familiar one-dimensional optical device, a Fabry-Perot resonator constructed from dielectric mirrors.¹ Of great interest is the likelihood that disorder in a photonic semiconductor will lead to strong localization of photons in the band tails, analogous to localization of electrons in amorphous semiconductors.² Structures exhibiting full photonic band gaps in the micro- wave,³ millimeter,⁴ and submillimeter⁵ regimes have been fabricated; scaling these structures down to the optical regime remains a technical challenge.

© 1995 Optical Society of America