Taking advantage of imperfections to focus light in photonic crystals inside the stop gap
[R. Uppu et al., arxiv, 2007.11104v1 (2020)]
Photonic crystals have the ability to forbid the entrance of light for certain ranges of frequencies, that is even the usual reason why we build them. Within the spatial frequency range for which the stop band of a given photonic crystal exists, modulation of the input wavefront should not dramatically modify the penetration of light, which exhibits an exponential decay. In this paper, R. Uppu and collaborators from the University of Twente demonstrate that it is indeed possible to drastically change the penetration properties of light inside a photonic crystal by optimizing the wavefront taking advantage of unavoidable sources of disorder. They experimentally show the focusing of light inside such crystal beyond the expected maximal penetration length - the Bragg length.
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