Revolutionizing Optoelectronics through Photonic Crystals and Metamaterials for Tailored Light-Matter Interactions

The development of photonic crystals and metamaterials has transformed the optoelectronic world by enabling new levels of control over the interactions between light and matter at the nanoscale. It examines the incorporation of these engineered nanostructures into optoelectronic devices to achieve advancement of key device parameters that include emission efficiency, speed of modulation and resonance quality. The work combines finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) and finite element method (FEM) simulation, along with experimental design and fabrication, to investigate the optimization of periodic dielectric lattice and subwavelength resonators to achieve optimal functionality. It was found that PCs can enhance the extraction of the light and spectral selectivity substantially whereas metamaterials can present quick modulation and tunability with external stimuli. The most successful overall performance was shown by the hybrid photonic crystal-metamaterial (PC-MM) architectures that offered up to 92 emission efficiency and 50 GHz modulation speed with Q-factors greater than 15,000. These results highlight the potential of altered optical materials to build compact, reconfigurable, high-performance optoelectronic devices that have the potential to be utilized in fields of communication, sensing, and photonic computing.