Reflection properties and defect formation in metallic photonic crystals

Summary form only given. Propagation of electromagnetic (EM) waves in periodic dielectric structures can be completely forbidden for a certain range of frequencies. These three-dimensional arrays - photonic bandgap (PBG) crystals - can be used to engineer the properties of the radiation field within these structures. Although, the earlier work on photonic crystals concentrated on building structures using dielectric materials, there are certain advantages of introducing metals to photonic crystals. First, the metals offer a higher rejection rate per layer when compared to dielectric crystals. Second, for microwave applications the dimensions of metallic crystals can be kept much smaller than the minimum dimensions needed for a typical dielectric crystal. In the paper, we investigate the reflection properties of layer-by-layer metallic photonic crystals, and use these properties to predict defect formation in layer-by-layer metallic photonic crystals.