Fabrication and optical characterization of 3-D polystyrene colloidal photonic crystal

Abstract

We fabricated 3-D photonic bandgap structures from dielectric colloidal polystyrene nano-spheres, Due to a low mass-density of polystyrene nano-spheres, it was found necessary to adopt a centrifuge method. A scanning electron microscope image of a fabricated sample showed a well-defined opaline structure. The measured optical transmission spectra of the fabricated opaline structures were theoretically simulated by use of the scalar wave approximation to obtain the diameter of spheres and the number of layers, which agreed well with the experimental structure parameters.