Photonic Crystal Elements

Integrated Elements

An autocloned photonic crystal polarizer or wave-plate element deposited on a single substrate offers the following benefits:
  1. High quality Polarizer & Wave-plates
  2. High degree of environmental stability (inorganic)
  3. Operating wavelength can be varied
Because substrate patterning is possible, it is a more flexible than conventional technologies making novel highly integrated optical elements feasible.

Highly integrated compound elements can be fabricated by combining polarizer and wave-plate elements with different anisotropic axes by the autocloning method, on an arbitrarily patterned substrate.
With elements as small as 5 microns square as many as 1 million elements per chip can be fabricated.

The figure above shows three examples of fabricated elements, 8 sector wave-plate (left), V-shaped wave-plate (center) and annular polarizer (right).

The ability to implement novel optical elements is a significant advantage of autocloned photonic crystals.