Bragg transmittance of s-polarized waves through finite-thickness photonic crystals with a periodically corrugated interface

Finite-thickness photonic crystals (PC's) with periodically corrugated interfaces are suggested to realize some unusual features in the behavior of transmitted Bragg beams (diffraction orders). The scattering of s-polarized plane waves by such structures is studied. It follows from the numerical results that rather thin corrugated PC's borrow their basic properties from both conventional PC's and gratings, leading to some new effects. In particular, a shift of the actual cutoff frequencies towards larger values than those of the Rayleigh cutoff frequencies can be obtained due to the ordinary opaque range in transmission, within which all propagative orders vanish. This effect can even be enhanced due to the nonordinary behavior arising at the edges of the ordinary opaque range, which manifests itself in that some but not all propagative orders in transmission are suppressed. Hence the opaque ranges for individual orders are wider than the corresponding ordinary range. Besides, frequency ranges exist which are not connected with the edge of the ordinary opaque range, where a similar nonordinary effect does appear. As a result, each propagative order in transmission generally has its own set of opaque ranges. Only a single order can be contributive while several others are formally propagative, too. The corrugations have to be located at the upper interface in order to realize these nonordinary effects. Moving the corrugation from the upper to the lower interface leads to a disappearance of the observed effects, so that their nature cannot be explained exclusively in terms of matching the wave vectors of the diffraction orders and the Floquet-Bloch waves. The conventional sequence of cutoffs for different diffraction orders with respect to each other can be changed for certain structures if the rods of a PC are made of Drude metal. Hence, transmission regimes can be realized which are beyond the classical theory of gratings. Several effects arising when varying the angle of incidence are demonstrated and briefly discussed. The detected effects can be used for controlling the number of actually contributive beams and for obtaining alternating ranges of single-beam and multibeam operation, which should lead to extending the potentials of optical and microwave technologies based on the use of single-beam and multibeam regimes.