Magneto-Optical Properties of One-Dimensional Photonic Crystals

Abstract

The magneto-optical properties of one-dimensional photonic crystals which are comprised of co-extruded alternating polymer layers of polymethyl-methacrylate (PMMA) and polystyrene (PS) are studied in this thesis. These polymers were used to experimentally test the hypothesis that Faraday rotation in a multilayer system is the sum of the rotations produced by each layer separately, themselves weighted according to the time spent in each constituent material multiplied by that material's Verdet coefficient. In the experiment, the transmissions and Faraday rotations for the monoliths of PS and PMMA films as well as a 128-layer (PS/PMMA)64 film were measured. A 64-layer (PS/PMMA)16(PMMA/PS)16 film was also measured by simply folding a single 32-layer PS/PMMA film to create a half-wavelength defect in the center of the quarter wavelength stack. The measured Faraday rotation spectrums show enhanced Faraday rotations that are found to be consistent with the predicted Faraday rotations.