Alexander Meek

Hyperuniform disordered photonic materials offer a novel setting for the study of electromagnetic wave propagation in disordered media. They have been shown to have large and complete photonic band gaps in two-dimensions, which have proved useful for arbitrarily shaped waveguides, enhanced solar absorption, and high-Q optical cavities. Investigation of one-dimensional stealthy hyperuniform disordered (SHD) photonic structures remains sparse. Therefore, further exploration is owed to the propagation of electromagnetic waves in one-dimensional SHD photonic structures, and to the geometric properties of the SHD patterns underlying them. In this work, we have generated one-dimensional SHD point patterns using a potential minimisation technique. Through plane-wave expansion simulation of one-dimensional SHD photonic structures, we found that the formation of photonic band gaps requires inclusion of a softcore repulsion term in the potential used to generate the SHD patterns. This repulsion set a minimum displacement between adjacent points and enables the prevention of overlapping scattering elements in the SHD photonic structure. This is in contrast to the case of two-dimensional SHD photonic structures in which large photonic band gaps are present in the absence of a softcore repulsion. With the introduction of a softcore repulsion, we were able to observe examples of photonic band gaps of 21.6% in one-dimensional SHD photonic structures based on Silicon and air. However, the mechanism behind band gap formation is thought to be the onset of medium to long range order. Finally, we present preliminary study of the localisation of electromagnetic waves in one-dimensional SHD photonic structures using both inverse participation ratio and level spacing statistics approaches.