Designing Photonic Crystal Devices for Accelerators

Photonic crystals (periodic dielectric structures with a lattice constant on the order of the wavelength of light) can have a wide range of properties. For instance, photonic crystals can be designed to be completely reflective within a certain bandwidth, thereby becoming a replacement for metal in accelerator structures such as waveguides and cavities. To see whether photonic crystals might find application in accelerators, and to design potential accelerator structures, we will need reliable computer simulations to predict fields and frequencies and other properties of photonic crystal structures. We propose to build photonic crystal structures in the microwave regime and test the validity of computer simulation against experiment. We can then explore more complex issues such as coupling to photonic crystal structures, higher-order mode rejection, and tunable photonic crystals.