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The superprism phenomenon, the dispersion of light 500 times stronger than the dispersion in conventional prisms, was demonstrated at optical wavelengths in photonic crystals (PC's) fabricated on Si. Drastic light-beam steering in the PC's was achieved by slightly changing the incident wavelength or angle. The scanning span reached 50/spl deg/ with only a 1% shift of incident wavelength, and reached 140/spl deg/ with only a 14/spl deg/ shift of the incident angle at wavelengths around 1 /spl mu/m. The propagation direction was quantitatively interpreted in terms of highly anisotropic dispersion surfaces derived by photonic band calculation. The physics behind this demonstration will open a novel field called photonic crystalline optics. The application of these phenomena promises to enable the fabrication of integrated microscale lightwave circuits (/spl mu/LC's) on Si with large scale integrated (LSI)-compatible lithography techniques. Such /spl mu/LC's will allow more efficient use of wavelength resources when used in wavelength multiplexers/demultiplexers or dispersion compensators by enabling lower loss and broader bandwidth.
Kosaka et al. (Fri,) studied this question.