Synthesis and Band Gap Control in Three-Dimensional Polystyrene Opal Photonic Crystals

High-quality three-dimensional polystyrene opal photonic crystals are fabricated by vertical deposition method. The transmission properties with different incident angles and different composite refractive index contrasts are experimentally and theoretically studied. Good agreement between the experiment and theory is achieved. We find that with the increasing incident angle, the gap position shifts to the short wavelength (blue shift) and the gap becomes shallower; and with the increase of refractive index of the opal void materials and decrease the contrast of refractive index, the gap position shifts to the long wavelength (red shift). At the same time, we observe the swelling effects when the sample is immerged in the solutions with different refractive indices, which make the microsphere diameter in solution become larger than that in air. The understanding of band gap shift behaviour may be helpful in designing optical sensors and tunable photonic crystal ultrafast optical switches.