Abstract

Propagation of electromagnetic (EM) waves in periodic dielectric structures can be completely forbidden for a certain range of frequencies.¹ These three-dimensional arrays—photonic bandgap (PBG) crystals—can be used to engineer the properties of the radiation field within these structures. Although, the earlier work on photonic crystals concentrated on building structures using dielectric materials, there are certain advantages of introducing metals to pho-tonic crystals.² First, the metals offer a higher ' rejection rate per layer when compared to dielectric crystals.³ Second, for microwave applications the dimensions of metallic crystals can be kept much smaller than the minimum dimensions needed for a typical dielectric crystal.⁴ In this paper, we investigate the reflection properties of layer-by-layer metallic photonic crystals, and use these properties to predict defect formation in layer-by-layer metallic photonic crystals.

© 1998 Optical Society of America