Suppressed transmission in aperiodically modulated multilayered dielectric structures

We investigate the transmission of electromagnetic plane waves through 1D binary dielectric multilayered structures that exhibit aperiodic incommensurated sequences of refractive indices. The aperiodicity is introduced by considering the sequence of refractive indices to follow a sinusoidal function whose phase ϕ varies as a power-law of the layer index, ϕ∝iν. For ν>1, the resulting sequence is effectively uncorrelated leading to the Anderson localization of most of the electromagnetic modes, except at the Bragg resonances. The crossover from a uniform structure at ν=0 to a quasi-periodic structure at ν=1 is signaled by a minimum at the spectrally averaged transmission. We perform a spectral analysis of the refractive index sequence to show its close connection to the main features exhibited by the averaged optical transmittance. Our results suggest that aperiodically modulated dielectric structures can potentially be used in the development of wide-band filters.