Opal-based photonic crystal with double photonic bandgap structure

The interior surfaces of one part of a piece of artificial opal have been coated with GaP so that the remaining part of the opal crystal remains empty, thus forming a photonic heterostructure. Two Bragg resonances have been observed in the optical transmission and reflectance spectra. These two resonances were found to behave differently with changes in the polarization of the incident light and the angle of propagation of the light with respect to the (111) planes of opal. Depolarization of the light was observed to occur most effectively at frequencies within the stop-bands, apparently due to the re-coupling of the propagating electromagnetic wave to a different system of eigenmodes when it crosses the interface separating two parts of the double photonic crystal.