Enlargement of the omnidirectional reflectance gap in one-dimensional photonic crystal heterostructure containing double negative index material

In this paper, we investigate by theoretical analysis a way to enlarge the frequency range of band gap in one-dimensional heterostructure photonic crystal (PC) made of two PCs alternate stacked by conventional and double negative index material. The numerical results by scattering matrix method (SMM) show that, for the proposed PC with appropriate parameters, there is an omnidirectional photonic band gap (OBG), which is insensitive to incident angle and polarization. The thickness ratio of layers in the second PC is the inverse and identical of that in the first PC, respectively. Two PCs form the PC heterostructures. Moreover, we demonstrate the existence of OBG and notable enlargement of the frequency range of the OBG in proposed PC heterostructure. The reason is that the pass band of one of the two PCs falls into the forbidden band of another PC. Decreasing the thickness of layers but not changing the thickness ratio of layers in the second PC, the frequency range of OBG keeps invariant. However, with the increasing of thickness of layers, the frequency range of OBG gets narrow.