Spatially shaping waves to penetrate deep inside a forbidden gap

Abstract

It is well known that waves incident upon a crystal are transported only over a limited distance - the Bragg length - before being reflected by Bragg interference. Here, we demonstrate how to send waves much deeper into crystals, by studying light in exemplary two-dimensional silicon photonic crystals. By spatially shaping the optical wavefronts, we observe that the intensity of laterally scattered light, that probes the internal energy density, is enhanced at a tunable distance away from the front surface. The intensity is up to $100\times$ enhanced compared to random wavefronts and extends as far as $8\times$ the Bragg length. Our novel steering of waves inside a forbidden gap exploits the transport channels induced by unavoidable deviations from perfect periodicity, here unavoidable fabrication deviations.

7 pages, 7 figures

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• Scaling theory of wave confinement in classical and quantum periodic systems
• Observation of mutual extinction and transparency in light scattering
• Observation of light propagation through a three-dimensional cavity superlattice in a 3D photonic band gap
• Controlled light scattering of a single nanoparticle by wavefront shaping
• Non-utopian optical properties computed of a tomographically reconstructed real photonic nanostructure
• Dispersion of backward-propagating waves in a surface defect on a 3D photonic band gap crystal
• Unsupervised Machine Learning to Classify the Confinement of Waves in Periodic Superstructures
• Wavefront shaping through a free-form scattering object
• Symmetries and Wavefunctions of Photons Confined in 3D Photonic Band Gap Superlattices