Band Structure and Coupled Surface Plasmons in One Dimensional, Frequency Dependent Photonic Crystals

In the last two decades photonic crystals (PC) have been studied in one, two and three dimensions. Recently metallic two and three dimensional PCs were investigated with the focus on using such structures in incandescent lightning and thermal photovoltaic applications. These structures exhibit a metallic band gap below a certain threshold frequency as well as structural band gaps. The PC can be designed that the metallic band gap allows to block the infrared transmission respectively emission. We will show that also simple one dimensional systems have the same features in case one component has a large absorbing part in its dielectric function. In this frequency region an omni-directional absorption band gap will occur. We demonstrate this effect by studying a metallic and polaritonic photonic crystal. In the last part of this article we show the dispersion relation of surface plasmons and polaritons by studying grazing incidence parallel to the layers. These surface states extend over adjacent layers and exhibit a region of negative group velocity for a polaritonic photonic crystal.