Photonic crystals: 'even thin is functional'

Photonic crystals are the nanostructures that can manipulate photons by means of an energy gap, similar to how the semiconductors in computer chips manipulate electronic current. It was always thought that photonic crystals should be thick and bulky to be functional. Scientists from the University of Tokyo, the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo, the Kyoto Institute of Technology and the University of Twente discovered that even very thin 3-D photonic band gap crystals are powerful de...