Band Structure Based Analysis of Certain Photonic Crystal Structures

Photonic crystals are periodic dielectric structures that may exhibit a complete photonic band gap. First, I discuss geometric properties of the band structure such as band edges. In a second part, I present work on photonic Wannier functions and their use for solving the wave equation. The third part is devoted to applications of the presented methods: A polarization resolved transmission experiment of opel films and an analogy experiment for spontaneous emission inside a photonic crystal.