Design of Cold Plasma Based Ternary Photonic Crystal for Microwave Applications

In this paper, we propose a 1D ternary photonic crystal with Silicon/MCP/Air structure, whose transmission properties have been analyzed. By employing the TMM, the transmittance spectra are plotted for the introduced TPC in four cases by varying the parameters: angle of incidence, lattice constant, static magnetic field, and electron density. The focus of this analysis is to illustrate the PBGs or zero-transmission regions (GHz) exhibited by the TPC in these four cases. In the first case, there exist three PBGs at normal incidence in which the first two bands are enhanced with increase in the incident angle, while the third band shows reverse nature. At the incident angle 89°, three sets of multiple sharp peaks of transmission, showing multichannel filter characteristics, occur in place of allowed regions, and such abnormal feature of the TPC is attributed to the existence of MCP. Next it is demonstrated that such TPC can be exploited as multiband reflectors for a larger lattice parameter with increased thickness of the Si layer. In the third and fourth cases, the first bandgap is found to be least sensitive to the variations in the parameters, while the tunability in second and third bands in both cases is opposite to each other. By comparing the features of this TPC with a binary PC of Silicon/MCP structure, the tunablity in the second bandgap is far better in case of TPC. Based on the investigated results, the TPC under different conditions may be a good candidate for various applications, including highly tunable broadband and multiband reflectors; and multichannel filters for dense wavelength division multiplexing and high-speed signal processing.