Photonic band structure of two-dimensional metal/dielectric photonic crystals.

An improved plane wave expansion method for the numerical calculation of photonic bands of metal/dielectric photonic crystal (PC) are presented. This method is applied to two-dimensional PCs with frequency-dependent dielectric constants. We obtained the photonic band structure of three kinds of structures: sawtooth, cylinder and hole PCs. The results show that the lowest band-1 is relatively flat, and does not approach zero. Also, there is no complete band-gap that extends throughout the first Brillouin zone for these three structures. However, there are partial band-gaps in different directions in the first Brillouin zone. For the complementary cylinder and hole PCs, their photonic bands are similar except for the lowest three bands; the hole PC’s lowest frequency of band-1 is larger than that of cylinder PC for the configuration R/d  =  0.2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]