Submicron diamond-lattice photonic crystals produced by two-photon laser nanofabrication

Diamond-lattice photonic crystal structures consisting of around 500-nm-diameter <111> rods and 580-nm-diameter photonic atoms were realized by two-photon photopolymerization. In the course of laser nanofabrication, it was found that the surface quality of elements depended on the crystal geometry, which was then interpreted as voxel floating effect arising from insufficient overlapping degree of voxels. With the solution of this issue, nearly perfect photonic lattices were obtained, from which single-period power rejection of approximately 35% was achieved. This work is an important step toward arbitrarily tailoring the density of photon states of photonic crystals according to end use by engineering cavity or crystalline geometry. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.