The Influence of a Power Law Distribution of Cluster Size on the Light Transmission of Disordered 1-D Photonic Structures

A better understanding of the optical properties of random photonic structures is beneficial for many applications, such as random lasing, optical imaging and photovoltaics. Here, we investigate the light transmission properties of disordered photonic structures in which the high refractive index layers are aggregated in clusters. The size of the clusters follows a power law distribution described by an exponential parameter a. The sorted high refractive layer clusters are randomly distributed within the low refractive index layers. We study the total light transmission within the photonic band gap of the corresponding periodic crystal as a function of the exponent in the distribution. We observe that, for 0 ≤ a ≤ 3.5, the trend can be fitted with a sigmoidal function.