Photonic band structure of multilayer photonic crystals

A rigorous computational method has been proposed for calculation of the photonic-band structure of multilayer one-dimensional photonic crystals (MLPCs). With the help of this method, the full wave analysis of the structure can be reduced to the analysis of an equivalent multiconductor transmission line. In this work, we present an analytical characteristic equation for the evaluation of the band-structure of MLPCs. The approach which is based on an equivalent matrix formulation of Maxwell´s equations also characterizes guided modes of MLPCs.