Fabrication of 3D photonic crystals by autocloning and its applications.

3D photonic crystals can produce a number of fascinating optical devices utilizing the band gap, the dispersive passband, and unisotropic band structure. We previously proposed a process for fabricating a 3D periodic nanostructure which can behave as photonic crystals. The key technique in the process is the deposition of a multilayer by bias sputtering replicating periodically a corrugated layer pattern, which is named the autocloning effect. This paper reviews our recent works on 3D photonic crystals: the mechanism of the autocloning effect, propagation analysis in the 3D photonic crystal by an FDTD method, and applications such as plane-normal waveguides or wavelength-selective filters. © 1999 Scripta Technica, Electron Comm Jpn Pt 2, 82(9): 43–52, 1999 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]