Parallel photonic quantum well consisting of photonic crystal containing negative-index material

We propose a different kind of photonic quantum well structure made of photonic crystals containing negative-index materials, the features of which are investigated by the transfer matrix method. The proposed structure can effectively enlarge the resonant tunneling mode frequency range by at least 1.4 GHz compared with the one reported previously. Its resonant tunneling mode is still insensitive to the incident angle and polarization as the ordinary photonic quantum well containing negative-index material. The number of the resonant tunneling mode can also be tuned by changing the period number of the constituent photonic crystals. Moreover, the structure with only one more photonic crystal than the ordinary one is relatively simple compared with the other structure, which may be used to enlarge the resonant tunneling mode frequency range, which can simplify fabrication and reduce energy loss of passing light in practice. These characteristics can improve it as an omnidirectional and multichannel filter. The method to construct it can also be applied to a photonic double quantum well structure. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America