| Metallo-dielectric photonic crystals (MDPCs) are characterized by a large difference between the dielectric constants of the constituents. Owing to their high DC conductivity a broad omnidirectional band gap is formed at low frequencies. At the same time there exist numerous propagating electromagnetic modes at frequencies above a cutoff. This gives a possibility of creating a "transparent" metal: a crystal transparent in the visible spectral range and simultaneously having high DC conductivity. Since the cutoff wavelength linearly scales with the crystal periodicity, in order to make an MDPC with propagating modes in the visible range the crystal periodicity has to be around a quarter micrometer. Fabrication of such a crystal is a challenging task. One of the feasible choices is natural or artificial opals, structures made of silica balls arranged into a close packed fcc lattice. The ball diameters could vary from 200 nm to several microns, allowing the desired optical features to be in the visible spectral range.; In the present work we studied metal-infiltrated opals numerically, analytically, and experimentally (Chapters 1 and 4). Both theory and experiment revealed high reflectance of the samples at large wavelengths associated with the low frequency metallic band gap formation, and low reflectance at short wavelengths that has characteristic wiggles. Contrarily, the absorbance is low in the IR region and goes up towards the UV end, which is due to low group velocity of light and high metal absorption in the region. Numerical analysis of thin metal-infiltrated opals (∼3-5 layers) did show a transmission peak around the first reflectance minimum and cutoff frequency.; In Chapter 5 we present transmission experiments on thin metal films perforated with periodic arrays of holes or deposited on an opal monolayer. Both types of 2D MDPCs exhibited anomalous transmission peaks associated with surface plasma excitations. It was shown that the phenomenon could be utilized in organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) and promotes an enhancement in the OLED electroluminescence quantum efficiency (ELQE). |
