Photonic crystal digital alloys and their band structure properties.

We investigated semi-disordered photonic crystals (PCs), digital alloys, and made thorough comparisons with their counterparts, random alloys. A set of diamond lattice PC digital alloys operating in a microwave regime were prepared by alternately stacking two kinds of sub-PC systems composed of alumina and silica spheres of the same size. Measured transmission spectra as well as calculated band structures revealed that when the digital alloy period is short, band-gaps of the digital alloys are practically the same as those of the random alloys. This study indicates that the concept of digital alloys holds for photons in PCs as well.