Friday, 10th March 2006 (5156 views)

British and German researchers have discovered a simple way of fabricating metallic photonic crystals, according to Nanowerk.

Photonic crystals are a new type of material that allows light to flow through in a way similar to how electrons travel through doped regions of semiconductors. This allows for remarkable manipulation of light that is impossible with conventional optics.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge's Optoelectronics Group at the Cavendish Laboratory and the 4. Physikalische Institute at Germany's Stuttgart University developed a photonic crystal containing metallic components, including gold nanoclusters.

The process threw up a method of fabricating devices such as sensors.

Said Dr Xinping Zhang of the Cavendish Laboratory: "Our method using solution-processible gold nanoparticles facilitates simple, high-speed and low-cost fabrication of such waveguided metallic photonic crystals in a large-area scale."

He said the sensors that could be produced had the advantage of "sharp resonances, which allows for increased sensor sensitivity when comparing with common particle Plasmon sensors."

 

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