May 17, 2024

MIT uses new methods to reveal the internal properties of photonic crystals

A new technique developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reveals the internal details of photonic crystals and their synthetic materials, the special optical properties of which are the subject of extensive research.

Photonic crystals are made using microfluidic chips in a similar way, made up of millions of densely packed micro-holes made of a transparent material. Depending on the exact direction and size of the micropores and the spacing of these holes, these materials can exhibit unique optical properties, including "super-lenses," which allow amplification up to magnifications beyond the normal theoretical limit, while "negative refractive index "Is the opposite of the path in which the light bends through the normal transparent material.

But to accurately understand the different colors and different directions of light through the photonic crystal when the situation needs to go through a very complex calculation. Researchers often use highly simplified methods, for example, they may only calculate light behavior along a single direction or a single frequency of light.

Instead, the new technology enables it to learn the full spectrum of photonic crystals. Researchers can use a simple laboratory setup to display their message patterns, the so-called "inter-frequency lines," a graphical form that makes taking and checking easy and in many cases does not require calculations. This method was published this week in Progress in Scientific Research by Bo Zhen, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, Emma Regan, who recently graduated from Wellesley and MIT, Polytechnic Institute of Physics Marin Soljacic and John Joannopoulos four people together to complete.

Zhen explained that the discovery of this new technology was discovered through the close observation of a phenomenon noticed by the researchers, which has been going through many years, but the origin of the phenomenon is not yet clearly understood. When the sample is illuminated by a laser, the mode of scattered light appears to scatter out of the sample of photonic material. This scattering is surprising because the underlying crystalline structure is almost perfect in these materials.

"When we try to do a laser measurement, we will always see this pattern," Zhen said. We observed this shape, but we did not know exactly what was happening, but it did help them get the correct alignment of the experimental setup, as the stray light pattern appears whenever the laser beam aligns correctly with the crystal. After careful analysis, they realized that the slight flaw in the scattering mode, that is, the pores in the crystal, are not perfectly circular but slightly tapered from one end to the other.

"There's such a flaw in the best samples," Regan said. "People think scattering is weak because the sample is almost perfect," but it turns out that light scattering is strong at certain angles and frequencies; up to 50 percent of the incident light can be scattered. In all visible spectra, by illuminating the sample with a sequence of different colors, it is possible to establish a complete display of the path taken with respect to the beam. Scattering light produces an intuitive view of a graph of different frequencies, a series of topographic maps of the curvature of different colored light beams as they pass through the photonic crystal.

"This is a very beautiful way of looking at a very straightforward frequency line," Soljacic said. "You just need to irradiate the sample with light in the right direction and frequency," and you get a direct image of the information you need, he said.

The team said the finding could be useful for many different applications. For example, it may be helpful to implement a large, transparent display screen that passes most of the light when it beats a window, and that light of a particular frequency will be scattered, resulting in a clear image. Or, this method can be used as a private display and will only be visible to people in front of the screen.

Because it relies on methods of making defects in crystals, the method can also be used for quality control of the manufacture of these materials; the imagery provides not only an indication of the total amount of defects, but also its specificity, ie the major disorder in the sample Is from a non-circular hole or etching is not straight and so on, and these processes can be adjusted and improved.

The panel also includes researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Electronic Research Laboratories, including Yuichi Igarashi (now at NEC Japan), Ido Kaminer, Chia Wei Hsu (now at Yale University), and Yichen Shen. The work is funded by the MIT Nanotechnology Center and the US Army Research Office, as well as the US Department of Energy's Energy Frontier Center.

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