Novel photonic crystal cavities and related structures.

The key accomplishment of this project is to achieve a much more in-depth understanding of the thermal emission physics of metallic photonic crystal through theoretical modeling and experimental measurements. An improved transfer matrix technique was developed to enable incorporation of complex dielectric function. Together with microscopic theory describing emitter radiative and non-radiative relaxation dynamics, a non-equilibrium thermal emission model is developed. Finally, experimental methodology was developed to measure absolute emissivity of photonic crystal at high temperatures with accuracy of +/-2%. Accurate emissivity measurements allow us to validate the procedure to treat the effect of the photonic crystal substrate.