Defects and diffraction in photonic crystals

Photonic crystals are very promising because they provide the ability to cr eate high performance microcavities with a high quality factor for a small modal volume. These cavity modes are obtained by creating defects in the pe riodicity and the defect design must be optimized to obtain the highest tra nsmission. We investigate defect properties in the graphite structure by va rying the size of some cylinders. Using the Transfer Matrix Method, we calc ulate the in-plane diffraction of defect rows and show how this diffraction affects the transmission of the cavity mode. (C) 1999 Academic Press.