Muševic says the experiments could lead to a new method of
making photonic crystals — semiconductors that process light instead of electricity.
To emulate this, the team
made their photonic crystal ink using mesoporous silica nanoparticles, which have a large surface area and strong vapor adsorption capabilities that can be precisely controlled.
Brown and Parker are now working on
making the photonic crystal out of silicon, gallium arsenide or indium phosphide, which would allow them to integrate the antenna and electronics on the same chip.
Shinpei Ogawa and his colleagues at Kyoto University in Japan
made a photonic crystal that resembles a stack of wood with each layer turned 90 degrees with respect to the one below it (see image).
Previously, the Canadian researchers
made photonic crystals using stacks of hundreds of silica nanospheres embedded in a polymer.
Not exact matches
Zheng Wang and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have
made what's known as a
photonic crystal from an array of ferrite rods.
García - Garibay hopes to design
crystals that take advantage of properties of light, and whose applications could include advances in communications technology, optical computing, sensing and the field of
photonics, which takes advantage of the properties of light; light can have enough energy to break and
make bonds in molecules.
The ability of
photonic crystals to control the flow of light
makes them a suitable material for diverse applications including optical communications, biosensors and solar cells.
Here, a researcher at the Department of Energy's Savannah River National Laboratory holds a
photonic crystal made from bismuth germanate.
The achievement was
made possible by a novel use of a material called a
photonic crystal.
For example,
photonic crystals based on this design could be used to
make large - volume single - mode laser devices.
The authors use the opportunities provided by nano - engineered dielectrics, the so - called
Photonic Crystals, to study both how to trap the atoms closer to each other and
make them interact through the guided modes in the structure.
A team led by Eli Yablonovitch of Bellcore, the research arm of the American regional telephone companies based in Redbank, New Jersey,
made the first
photonic crystal last year by drilling holes in material that is transparent to microwaves.
Like metamaterials,
photonic crystals are
made of many identical cells.