Abstract

Many efforts are devoted worldwide to control emission and propagation of light using nanophotonic metamaterials [1]. Of particular interest are 3D photonic band gap crystals in which light is forbidden to propagate in all directions and for all polarizations. Nevertheless it remains a great challenge to fabricate such 3D nanophotonic materials. The widely employed fabrication of 3D photonic crystals with deposition techniques suffers from nanocrystallinity or even amorphous backbones with concomitant impurities, which causes undesired scattering and absorption[2]. A powerful alternative is to use a high purity single crystalline silicon for the fabrication of nanophotonic materials. The use of high-purity silicon and reactive ion etching allowed to demonstrate for the first time a strong inhibition of spontaneous emission inside a 3D photonic band gap crystal [3]. Nevertheless the fabrication procedure requireds an involved alignment of masks on two inclined planes with respect to each other significantly slows progress in this area [4].

© 2015 IEEE