Photonic Crystals

Perhaps the most commonly known optical metamaterials are photonic crystals. Photonic crystals allow the control of photons in all three dimensions, and are the basis for new and novel areas of research including photonic band gap materials and self-collimating optical materials.  Prime has used photonic crystals as the basis for a variety of sensor and imaging applications, such as increasing the sensitivity of fiber optic fluorescence-based chemical sensors through self-collimation and creating space-variant photonic crystal polarizers for advanced imaging applications.

Photonic crystals can be designed to control photons in all 3 dimensions.

Prototype fiber optic chemical sensor using a self-collimating photonic crystal sensing element attached to the end of an optical fiber.