A computational approach to the optical characterization of photonic crystals and photonic glasses

The present paper describes a computational physics approach to the analysis of the light scattering from a three dimensional face-cubic centered lattice of spherical particles. The scattered electromagnetic field distribution is obtained after development of a parallelized FDTD (Finite Difference Time Domain) MPI code for the full numerical solution of the Maxwell’s equations, with an impinging plane wave and assigned permittivity of the various spherical particles in the lattice. The aim is to numerically calculate the reflectance and transmittance of a crystal sample in the 500÷1000 nm wavelength range by determining, via the near-to-far field transforming Kirchhoff formula, applied to the FDTD scattered results, the angular distribution of the reflected and transmitted light. This study is suitable for the predictive optical characterization/simulation of large ordered photonic structures and, as a possible further development, of disordered distributions such as glasses.