Fabrication of two-dimensional and three-dimensional photonic crystals and templates

The prediction and the confirmation that artificial periodic dielectric structures can be used to manipulate electromagnetic wave propagation affected significantly the development of the micro- and nano-optoelectronics. Many new devices such as on-chip waveguides with sharp bends and cavity resonators were developed based on this idea. There is a great diversity in the fabrication approaches for making 2D and 3D photonic crystals and there is always a need for improving them in terms of being more feature size flexible, materials flexible and less time consuming.; This thesis presents three new ideas. First, it is introducing a synthetic approach for the fabrication of 2D photonic crystals by combining interference lithography and potentiostatic electrodeposition of CdSe. This two-step process offers the flexibility of using composite materials to build PCs and also allows the integration of PCs onto arbitrary substrates. Secondly, the single diffraction element used to generate 2D interference patterns was redesigned to create 3D patterns. The results proved the versatility of the proposed method and confirmed that the single diffraction element setup can be used to create uniform 3D structures over a large substrate area. Thirdly, a tunable beam splitter for the purpose of multibeam interference was designed, giving the opportunity to adjust the incident beam angles and thus allowing a fabrication of structures with different periodicities. This beam splitter advances the principle on which the single diffraction element works by solving its most important limitations. The final results demonstrated the flexibility of fabricating different 3D periodic structures in photosensitive polymers by means of four-beam interference.