Concepedia

Ceramic Photonic Glass for Broadband Omnidirectional Reflection

P. N. Dyachenko, Jefferson J. do Rosário, Elisabeth W. Leib, Alexander Yu. Petrov, Roman Kubrin, Gerold A. Schneider, Horst Weller, Manfred Eich

ACS Photonics · 2014 · 31 citations · 30 references

DOI

TL;DR

We report on the fabrication and properties of ceramic photonic glass, a disordered arrangement of monodisperse ceramic spheres sized to match incident light wavelengths. Ceramic spheres of varying sizes were produced via sol–gel chemistry and assembled into photonic glass films of 7–100 µm thickness by drop casting from ethylene glycol suspensions. The resulting thin films exhibit broadband reflection across visible and infrared ranges, with larger particles extending the reflection window and 3 µm particles achieving strong 1–6 µm thermal barrier performance.

Abstract

We report on the fabrication and properties of ceramic photonic glass, a disordered arrangement of monodisperse ceramic spheres with diameters in the range of the wavelengths of incident light. These novel materials are produced as solid thin films which can be used for a wide range of applications, such as broadband visible reflectors, thermal radiation barrier coatings, high temperature stable structural coloration, resonant random lasers and media for photonic Anderson localization. Large nearly monodisperse spheres of different sizes were obtained by methods of sol–gel chemistry. Photonic glass films with layer thickness varied in the range 7–100 μm were deposited by drop casting from suspensions in ethylene glycol. Larger particles demonstrate a larger spectral window of broadband reflection. For thermal barrier coating applications strong reflection in the wavelength range of 1–6 μm is obtained with particles close to 3 μm diameter.