Engineering and Characterizing Light-matter Interactions in Photonic Crystals By

Photonic crystals can affect the behavior of visible light, and other electromagnetic waves, in ways that are not possible by other means. The propagation of photons can be completely forbidden or the the light can be made to follow a welldefined path. Fluorescent emission can be enhanced for some wavelengths or completely shut off for others, and it is possible to do all this simultaneously in a single structure. However, photonic crystals are very difficult to fabricate as they require precision patterning at sub-micron length scales. This fabrication difficulty has resulted in many of the potential applications for photonic crystals to currently be unrealized. Similarly, there is an abundance of opportunities to explore the workings of photonic crystals and also to develop exciting new methods for their fabrication. The content of this dissertation explores some methods for fabricating photonic crystals, including direct laser writing, interference lithography, colloidal deposition, and chemical vapor deposition. The angle-resolved characterization of photonic crystals is performed on fluorescent photonic crystals that exhibit uniquely photonic effects, which are explained with a simplified model of the electromagnetic wave-functions. Another model is shown to well-explain the emission from fluorescent photonic crystals that are not of sufficient quality to exhibit truly photonic effects. The ability to perform angleresolved optical characterization is improved with a commercial 4-circle diffractometer. A method to determination the resulting structure of conformal deposition processes proves useful as a tool for the design, modeling, and characterization of photonic