Shape precompensation in two-photon laser nanowriting of photonic lattices

We first analyze why most of the photonic crystals produced by two-photon photopolymerization technique exhibit no photonic band gap effect. And then subdiffraction-limited resolution-enabled finely quantified pixel writing, a scheme that has been used in micromachine fabrication, is adopted as the solution. As a result, higher accuracy in depicting and better reproducibility in both fabrication and photonic band gap effect observation are obtained. More important, the method allows for precise precompensation of the structure shrinkage induced by photochemical reactions of polymerization, which may pave the way to high-fidelity fabrication of polymer photonic and optoelectronic devices that require strictly the structural parameters. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.