Abstract

Three-dimensional (3D) photonic crystals (PCs) become a very hot topic nowadays due to their capability to control and manipulate the flow of light in all three dimensions and their potential usage as promising components in integrated optical devices [1]. To explore more advanced functionality of 3D PCs, a complete understanding of the light matter interaction inside the 3D PCs is of crucial importance, in particular, in active PCs. Research on this aspect has been overwhelmed by theoretical calculations. Direct experimental evidences are reliable and extremely useful, but are difficult to obtain because the fine confinement of the electromagnetic mode by the 3D PCs does not allow the propagation of light at a certain wavelength to the far-field region, which means that it is impossible to reveal the insight of the light behavior inside the 3D PCs by using the conventional far-field detection. As a powerful tool capable of detecting near-field signals, scanning nearfield optical microscope (SNOM) has recently been applied to study the detailed local intensity distributions in twodimensional PC structures because it provides the significant information about the optical properties of the devices, which was previously inaccessible [2].

© 2007 IEEE