Analysis of surface modes in photonic crystals by a plane-wave transfer-matrix method

We have developed a plane-wave transfer-matrix method (PWTMM) with the aid of the interpolation technique to analyze the dispersion relation of surface modes in photonic crystal or photonic crystal surface waveguide. The proposed approach has been applied to several surface structures in two-dimensional photonic crystals. The calculated dispersion relation of the surface modes is in good agreement with the result obtained by the conventional plane-wave expansion method in combination with the supercell technique. The developed PWTMM needs to handle only a single unit-cell layer domain and is therefore numerically friendly. The proposed approach can become an efficient and accurate numerical tool to understand and design surface modes in different two-dimensional and three-dimensional photonic crystals with complex geometries. (C) 2008 Optical Society of America.