Issue 35/2013 - Scientists develop nanoscale photonic crystals

Scientists have developed nanoscale photonic crystals

According to the Physicists Organization Network reported on September 3 (Beijing time), an international research team from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia and Friedrich Alexander University (FAU) in Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, has developed a nano-scale photonic crystal device smaller than the width of a human hair by imitating the microstructure of butterfly wings, which can be applied to both linear and circular polarized light, making optical communication faster and safer
.

Photonic crystals are equivalent to miniature polarizing beamsplitters
.
Polarization beamsplitters are used in modern technologies such as telecommunications, microscopy and multimedia
.
However, natural crystals are only suitable for linearly polarized light, not circular polarized light
.
The researchers used three-dimensional laser nanotechnology to make the photonic crystal have properties that natural photonic crystals do not have, so that it can be applied to circularly polarized light
.
The tiny device contains more than 750,000 tiny polymer nanorods
.

Professors at Swinburne University's Centre for Microphotonics believe that the work created the first nanoscale photonic crystal chiral beamsplitter.

It has the potential to be a useful electronic component for the development of integrated photonic circuits, playing an important role
in optical communications, imaging, computer information processing technology, and sensing.
This technology opens up new possibilities for moving to nanophotonic devices, bringing the industry one step closer to developing optical chips that can overcome bandwidth bottlenecks in ultra-high-speed optical networks
.
(Wang Hui)