Band-gap engineering and light manipulation with Egg-crate photnic lattices

Egg-crate lattices are a new type of photonic lattice that can be established in nonconventionally biased (NCB) photorefractive crystals, which enables the reconfiguration of desired photonic structures and Brillouin zones (BZs) for bandgap engineering and light manipulation. These lattices resemble ionic crystal lattices with alternating positive and negative charges, which leads to novel wave transmission properties compared to conventional lattices. The first BZ for lattice overlaps with the 2nd BZs for other lattices, enabling another host of new phenomena such as transitions between Bloch modes associated with different high-symmetry points, between normal and anomalous diffraction, and between positive and negative refraction by the probe beam excitation.