Fabrication of 3D photonic crystals by autocloning and its applications

3D photonic crystals can produce a number of fascinating optical devices ut ilizing the band gap, the dispersive passband, and unisotropic band structu re. We previously proposed a process for fabricating a 3D periodic nanostru cture which can behave as photonic crystals. The key technique in the proce ss is the deposition of a multilayer by bias sputtering replicating periodi cally a corrugated layer pattern, which is named the autocloning effect. Th is 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 wavele ngth-selective filters. (C) 1999 Scripta Technica, Electron Comm Jpn Pt 2, 82(9): 43-52, 1999.