Real metals in metallo-dielectric photonic crystals in the visible

A study of the defect modes in metallo-dielectric photonic crystals with real metallic components and real background materials is presented. Because of the frequency-dependent nature of the dielectric function of the metal, it is shown that the dependence of the photonic bands and band gaps with the geometric characteristics of the photonic crystal is different than what is expected in common all dielectric photonic crystals. We show an example of the field distribution of the defect modes and analyze the dependence of their resonant wavelength with the size of the defect scatterer.