Abstract

Unfortunately, despite recent successes in achieving 3D periodic semiconductor photonic band gap crystals with self-assembly of colloidal microspheres, strong skepticism remains whether such crystals will ever be useful. Natural assembly not only yields irregular, polycrystalline photonic crystals that are impossible to incorporate into a device, but more importantly, it leads to many defects that destroy the photonic bandgap. Here, these issues will be addressed by exploring high- quality silicon inverted opals that are assembled directly “on-chip” (Ref. 1).

© 2002 Optical Society of America