Influence of the dielectric background on the quality factors of metallo-dielectric photonic crystals

The effect of varying the dielectric background on the quality factor of two-dimensional metallo-dielectric photonic crystals is theoretically studied. The studied metallo-dielectric photonic crystal consists of a square lattice of circular metallic rods embedded into a dielectric background with a defect rod on the center that creates resonant modes within the photonic band gap. The metal is modeled with the Drude dispersion relation. A combination of the finite-difference time-domain method together with a frequency filtering technique is used to estimate accurately the resonant frequencies and their quality factors. The results show that the quality factors increase with increasing background dielectric constant. If a dielectric background material such as Silicon is used instead of air, an enhancement in the quality factor of up to eight times can be achieved, depending on the resonant mode. We also show that, depending on the modes, there exists an optimal size for the defect rod that gives the maximum quality factor.