Photonic band-edge-induced enhancement in absorption and emission

Abstract

An enhancement in photonic band-edge-induced absorption and emission from rhodamine-B dye doped polystyrene pseudo gap photonic crystals is studied. The band-edge-induced enhancement in absorption is achieved by selecting the incident angle of the excitation beam so that the absorption spectrum of the emitter overlaps the photonic band edge. The band-edge-induced enhancement in emission, on the other hand, is possible with and without an enhancement in band-edge-induced absorption, depending on the collection angle of emission. Through a simple set of measurements with suitably chosen angles for excitation and emission, we achieve a maximum enhancement of 70% in emission intensity with band-edge-induced effects over and above the intrinsic emission in the case of self-assembled opals. This is a comprehensive effort to interpret tunable lasing in opals as well as to predict the wavelength of lasing arising as a result of band-edge-induced distributed feedback effects.