Abstract

The ability to control light propagation by tailoring photonic band gap materials has attracted a lot of attention within the last decades, and research activities in this field have led to numerous groundbreaking developments in optics [1]. Designing the optical properties of materials, spatial photonic band gaps arise which can be considered as the key requirement for ballistic photon transport leading to exciting effects such as e.g. gap soli-tons, vortex solitons, or quantum tunneling effects [2]. Photonic lattices realized by optically inducing refractive index modifications in photorefractive materials have revealed to be an ideal testbed to investigate light propagation in symmetric band gap structures and the number of possible complex periodic lattices underlines the versatility of the optical induction method [3].

© 2015 IEEE