CdSe infiltrated TiO2 based omnidirectional photonic crystals for visible light control

Control of light emission by engineering the electromagnetic vacuum is important in photonics for fundamental understanding as well as in applications. Omnidirectional photonic crystals such as logpile photonic crystals provide a very interesting system to study such phenomena. Here, we describe the first steps towards achieving systematic and reproducible control of light using titanium dioxide (TiO2) logpile photonic crystals (PC) with incorporated cadmium chalcogenide (CdSe) quantum dots (QDs) (λ ∼ 600 nm) to potentially modify QD photoluminescence (PL). We present a technique for coating a monolayer of the QDs on the PC rods based on 3-mercaptopropyltrimethoxysilanol linkage and measured the resulting PL response. Comparison of the PL spectra to a finite difference time domain model shows the need for further localization of QDs and fabrication of additional PC unit cells to observe PL modification.