Interplay of dual photonic stopband in fluorescence enhancement from dye-doped photonic crystal heterostructures

Photonic crystal (PhC) structures with appropriate characteristics are necessary to control spontaneous emission from fluorophores while designing miniaturized lasers. We report the fabrication and detailed studies on the emission features of two different spectrally engineered PhC heterostructures made from dye-doped opal and one-dimensional (1-D) multilayer stack. Our results demonstrate notable enhancements of emission from PhC heterostructure enabled by the stopband overlap of three-dimensional (3-D) opals and 1-D multilayers. In the presence of the 1-D multilayer, the distributed feedback from opals further enhances the emission from the dye. We emphasize the role of the interplay of the spectral overlap of stopbands and the band edges in the dye-doped PhC heterostructures to control their emission features. The emission results obtained from our heterostructures are very much dependent on the relative spectral position of the stopbands of the constituent 1-D and 3-D photonic crystals. Input pump energy-dependent emission results indicate that such heterostructures are potential candidates for designing colloidal PhC-based lasers. (C) 2019 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)