Abstract

Control over spontaneous emission has many applications ranging from solar energy harvesting and lasing, to single-photon sources for quantum information and telecommunication. As described by Fermi’s “golden rule”, the radiative decay rate of the emitters is proportional to the local density of optical states (LDOS) [1,2]. The LDOS counts all available optical modes and is interpreted as the strength of the vacuum fluctuations. In certain three-dimensional crystals, a frequency range exist for all polarizations for which light is not allowed to propagate in any direction, called the 3D photonic band gap: a frequency range where the density of vacuum fluctuations vanishes in an ideal infinitely large and perfect system [3,4].

© 2013 IEEE