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On-chip natural assembly of silicon photonic bandgap crystals

Nature volume 414, pages 289–293 (2001)Cite this article

Abstract

Photonic bandgap crystals can reflect light for any direction of propagation in specific wavelength ranges1,2,3. This property, which can be used to confine, manipulate and guide photons, should allow the creation of all-optical integrated circuits. To achieve this goal, conventional semiconductor nanofabrication techniques have been adapted to make photonic crystals4,5,6,7,8,9. A potentially simpler and cheaper approach for creating three-dimensional periodic structures is the natural assembly of colloidal microspheres10,11,12,13,14,15. However, this approach yields irregular, polycrystalline photonic crystals that are difficult to incorporate into a device. More importantly, it leads to many structural defects that can destroy the photonic bandgap16,17. Here we show that by assembling a thin layer of colloidal spheres on a silicon substrate, we can obtain planar, single-crystalline silicon photonic crystals that have defect densities sufficiently low that the bandgap survives. As expected from theory, we observe unity reflectance in two crystalline directions of our photonic crystals around a wavelength of 1.3 micrometres. We also show that additional fabrication steps, intentional doping and patterning, can be performed, so demonstrating the potential for specific device applications.

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Figure 1: Characterization of thin planar opal templates assembled directly on a Si wafer from 855-nm spheres.
Figure 2: SEM images of planar Si photonic crystals.
Figure 3: Comparison of optical results with calculations.
Figure 4: Doping and patterning Si photonic crystals.

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Reynolds for providing transfer matrix computer code (Translight), P. Chaikin and S. Wagner for discussions, and N. Yao for experimental assistance. This work was partially supported by DARPA/ONR.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NEC Research Institute, 4 Independence Way, Princeton, 08540, New Jersey, USA

    Yurii A. Vlasov & David J. Norris

  2. A. F. Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Yurii A. Vlasov

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering and Center for Photonics and Optoelectronic Materials, Princeton University, Princeton, 08544, New Jersey, USA

    Xiang-Zheng Bo & James C. Sturm

Authors
  1. Yurii A. Vlasov
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  2. Xiang-Zheng Bo
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  4. David J. Norris
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Correspondence to David J. Norris.

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Vlasov, Y., Bo, XZ., Sturm, J. et al. On-chip natural assembly of silicon photonic bandgap crystals. Nature 414, 289–293 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35104529

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