Photonic material for designing arbitrarily shaped waveguides in two dimensions

We investigate numerically optical properties of novel two-dimensional photonic materials where parallel dielectric rods are randomly placed with the restriction that the distance between rods is larger than a certain value. A large complete photonic gap (PG) is found when rods have sufficient density and dielectric contrast. Our result shows that neither long-range nor short-range order is an essential prerequisite to the formation of PG’s in the novel photonic material. A universal principle is proposed for designing arbitrarily shaped waveguides, where waveguides are fenced with side walls of periodic rods and surrounded by the novel photonic materials. We observe highly efficient transmission of light for various waveguides. Due to structural uniformity, the novel photonic materials are well suited for filling up the outer region of waveguides of arbitrary shape and dimension comparable with the wavelength.