Fabrication of Photonic Crystal Based on Polystyrene Particles

Abstract

Photonic crystals are dielectric materials with different refractive index or permittivity periodically. Photonic crystals have widely application for future technology such as waveguide, optical transistor, cavity of laser and biosensor. Photonic crystals can be fabricated in three types i.e 1D, 2D and 3D structure. In this paper, we report the successful fabrication of 3D photonic crystal from polystyrene particles. The fabrication process began with the synthesis of polystyrene particles followed by deposition on glass and flexible substrate using self-assembly method. We obtained polystyrene monodispered particles which have a uniform shaped with diameter 320 nm. Self-assembly method resulted to the arrangement of polystyrene particles on glass and flexible substrate. Stop band which is related to its optical property are at wavelength of 721 nm and 631 nm for photonic crystal on glass and flexible substrate, respectively. We found that filling fraction of photonic crystal on flexible substrate is lower than that of glass substrate due to some defects.