We have developed a powerful parallel genetic algorithm design tool for photonic crystal and waveguide structures. The tool employs a small-population-size genetic algorithm (microgenetic algorithm) for global optimization and a two-dimensional finite-difference time-domain method to rigorously design and optimize the performance of photonic devices. We discuss the implementation and performanc...

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Photonic crystals with tunability in the visible region are of great interest for controlling light diffraction. Mechanochromic photonic materials are periodically structured soft materials designed with a photonic stop-band that can be tuned by mechanical forces to reflect specific colours. Soft photonic materials with broad colour tunability and fast colour switching are invaluable for applic...

In a three dimensional photonic crystal, an artificially formed dielectric structure, periodic along three different axes, when electromagnetic waves interact they periodically modulate the dielectric constant. A photonic band gap may form in these directions prohibiting the propagation of photons for energies that lie within the gap. Under certain conditions, there will be regions of forbidden...

Modern chip-scale computing system performance is increasingly becoming determined by the characteristics of the interconnection network. Photonic technology has been proposed as an alternative to traditional electronic interconnects for its advantages in bandwidth density, latency, and power efficiency. Circuit-switched photonic network architectures take advantage of the optical spectrum to c...

The non-interacting nature of light makes the observation of photonic quantum phase transitions an impossible task. We demonstrate how a photonic insulator type of phase(Mott phase) can arise in an array of coupled high Q electromagnetic cavities and show how to drive the system to a superfluid state. Each cavity site is coupled resonantly to a single two level system (atom/quantum dot/Cooper p...

We analyze the properties of thermal radiation in photonic crystals and show that the spectral energy density, the spectral intensity, and the spectral hemispherical power are only limited by the total number of available photonic states and their propagation characteristics. In addition, we show that the central quantity that determines these thermal radiation characteristics is the area of th...

We show that the propagation effects of optical beams in three-dimensional photonic crystal structures can be modeled using a direction-dependent effective diffractive index model. The parameters of the model (i.e., the effective diffractive indices) can be calculated using the curvatures of the band structure of the photonic crystal at the operation point. After finding these indices, the wave...

The emergence of personalized and stratified medicine requires label-free, low-cost diagnostic technology capable of monitoring multiple disease biomarkers in parallel. Silicon photonic biosensors combine high-sensitivity analysis with scalable, low-cost manufacturing, but they tend to measure only a single biomarker and provide no information about their (bio)chemical activity. Here we introdu...

Coupled states of semiconductor quantum well (QW) excitons and photons in a two dimensional (2D) periodic lattice of microcavities are analyzed theoretically, revealing allowed bands and forbidden gaps in the energy spectrum of exciton polaritons. Photonic crystal exciton polaritons have spatially uniform excitonic constituent set by flat QWs, but exhibit periodic Bloch oscillations in the plan...