Properties of omnidirectional photonic band gap in one-dimensional staggered plasma photonic crystals

In this paper, the properties of the omnidirectional photonic band gap (OBG) realized by one-dimensional (1D) photonic crystals (PCs) with a staggered structure which is composed of plasma and isotropic dielectric layer have been theoretically studied by the transfer matrix method (TMM). From the numerical results, it has been shown that such OBG is insensitive to the incident angle and the polarization of electromagnetic wave (EM wave), and the frequency range and central frequency of OBG can be effectively controlled by adjusting the plasma frequency, the average thickness of plasma layer, the average thickness of dielectric layer and staggered parameters, respectively. The frequency range of OBG can be notably enlarged with increasing the plasma frequency, average thickness of plasma layer, respectively. Moreover, the bandwidth of OBG can be narrowed with increasing the average thickness of dielectric layer. Changing staggered parameters of dielectric and plasma layer means that the OBG can be tuned. It is shown that 1D plasma dielectric photonic crystals (PPCs) with such staggered structure have a superior feature in the enhancement of frequency range of OBG compared with the conventional 1D binary PPCs. This kind of OBG has potential applications in filters, microcavities, and fibers, etc. Crown Copyright (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.