Active medium inside photonic band structured microcavity

Microcavity that has inherent photonic band structure within exhibits unique optical characteristics. Based on electron-beam lithography, we have successfully created a two-dimensional wavelength-scale periodic texture on one of the cavity mirrors with nanometer precision. In the microcavity, Bragg scattering is expected to provide a full continuous optical bandgap and flat dispersion of optical waveguide modes in the visible regime. When the luminescing material such as Alq₃ is placed inside the 2-D patterned microcavity, the coupling of the luminescing matter to the photonic eigenmodes of the metallic microcavity is observed. Careful tailoring of the photonic lattice parameters allows us to tune the emission characteristic of the microcavity. From the transmission result, we found that planar microcavity result is in good agreement with the theoretical calculation. For the laterally structured metallic microcavity samples, we found that the dispersion of optical modes inside the microcavity is significantly altered compare with the planar metallic microcavity.