M.S. Physics Project Talk: Isa Vasquez - "Complete Photonic Band Gaps in Hyperuniform Disordered Structures"

"Complete Photonic Band Gaps in Hyperuniform Disordered Structures"

Hyperuniform disordered structures are organizations of materials in which the structure factor approaches 0 for k vectors for small wave vectors k.  The percentage fluctuation of particle numbers within a window decreases as the window size increases. Being disordered allows them to be isotropic. They have the fascinating characteristic of isotropic photonic band gaps, meaning electromagnetic waves of a given frequency cannot exist or pass through them, regardless of the angle of incidence. This thesis investigates new types of hyperuniform disordered structures, promising for forming photonic band gaps. We compute the fully vectorial eigenmodes of Maxwell's equations with periodic boundary conditions using the free software MPB. Additionally, we performed finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations [28] using the open-source software package MEEP to characterize the photonic bandgaps of these new hyperuniform disordered structures and find the optimal conditions for forming the widest photonic bandgaps.