A three-dimensional photonic crystal model: Hollow-spherical non-closed-packed face-centered cubic structure

We report a photonic crystal model, which consists of hollow spheres located at face-centered cubic lattice sites and each sphere connected to all of its 12 nearest neighbors by cylindrical rods. Theoretical calculations show that this kind of structure exhibits two large complete photonic band gaps. The maximum relative gap sizes reach 17.3% between the eighth and ninth bands, and 15.1% between the 13th and 14th bands for a dielectric contrast of 11.9, and the minimal dielectric contrasts needed to open the two gaps are 5.8 and 7.3, respectively, which are lower than that of other face-centered cubic photonic crystal structures.