| Many progresses were made in the modeling of photonic crystals but the technology which will enable their mass production at reasonable prices remains to be defined. Among the techniques used to date, colloidal assembly is the most promising one for the fabrication of photonic crystals with a complete photonic band gap in the visible. However, the crystals obtained using this method have a low refractive index contrast, are polycrystalline and have many defects. The work presented in this thesis enables to solve these problems and to design high quality photonic band gap materials. To improve the refractive index contrast, the interstices between the polystyrene spheres of colloidal crystals are filled with silver, TiO2, or BaTiO3. In the first case, one obtains a composite material of polystyrene spheres in a silver matrix. In the other cases, the polystyrene spheres are burned and the resulting material is composed by air spheres in a high refractive index material. To eliminate the polycrystallinity and the defects, the surface potential of the substrates on which the colloidal crystals grew was modified. |
