Semiconductor three-dimensional photonic crystals operating at infrared wavelength region

Summary form only given. Recently, much attention has been paid to photonic crystals (PCs) for novel scientific and engineering applications such as the inhibition of spontaneous emission, threshold-less lasers, very compact optical circuits, and so on. The realization of complete photonic band gap and the introduction of the defect states are very important for such applications. However, there are very few reports on the complete three-dimensional (3D) PCs at optical wavelength region due to the difficulty of wavelength-order micro processes. In this work, we have developed complete 3D PCs with an asymmetric face-centered cubic (FCC) structure operating at infrared wavelength region (5/spl sim/10 /spl mu/m) and show that the considerable attenuation as large as 30 dB has been achieved for the first time.