Designer disordered materials with large, complete photonic band gaps

Abstract

We present designs of 2D, isotropic, disordered, photonic materials of arbitrary size with complete band gaps blocking all directions and polarizations. The designs with the largest band gaps are obtained by a constrained optimization method that starts from a hyperuniform disordered point pattern, an array of points whose number variance within a spherical sampling window grows more slowly than the volume. We argue that hyperuniformity, combined with uniform local topology and short-range geometric order, can explain how complete photonic band gaps are possible without long-range translational order. We note the ramifications for electronic and phononic band gaps in disordered materials.