Photonic crystal heterostructures fabricated by TiO2 and ZnO inverse opals using colloidal crystal template with single kind of microspheres

The fabrication of photonic crystal heterostructures is important for the applications in the fields of integrated photonic crystal chips, multi-frequency optical Bragg filters or mirrors. However, multiple steps of self-assembly process of microspheres are always employed in the fabrication of photonic crystal heterostructures, which may produce lattice mismatches of colloidal crystals. Therefore, photonic crystal heterostructures fabricated by using colloidal crystal template with single kind of microspheres were investigated in this paper. A colloidal crystal template with uniform periodicity was firstly formed by monodispersed polystyrene microsphere. Then ZnO was electrodeposited into the interstices of the template. The thickness of ZnO was controlled to be less than the thickness of the template by varying the deposition time. After the TiO2 precursor was filled into the top voids in the template, the polystyrene colloidal crystal template was removed and photonic crystal heterostructures fabricated by ZnO and TiO2 were formed. Both the dielectric constant and the periodicity of the two parts of the heterostructures are different due to the shrinkage of the sol–gel process. The ZnO/TiO2 heterostructures have a broad photonic stop band which is the superposition of photonic stop bands of ZnO inverse opals and TiO2 inverse opals.