Visible Wavelength Photonic Insulator for Enhancing LED Light Emission

We report design and simulation of a two-dimensional (2D) silicon-based nanophotonic crystal as an optical insulator to enhance the light emission efficiency of light-emitting diodes (LEDs). The device was designed in a manner that a triangular array silicon photonic crystal light insulator has a square trench in the middle where LED can be placed. By varying the normalized radius in the range of 0.3-0.5 using plane wave expansion method (PWEM), we found that the normalized radius of 0.45 creates a large band gap for transverse electric (TE) polarization. Subsequently a series of light propagation simulation were carried out using 2D and three-dimensional (3D) finite-difference time-domain (FDTD). The designed silicon-based light insulator device shows optical characteristics of a region in which light propagation was forbidden in the horizontal plane for TE light with most of the visible light spectrum in the wavelength range of 450 nm to 600 nm.