Royal Society of Chemistry, RSC Advances, 21(4), p. 10454
DOI: 10.1039/c3ra47984f
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Fabricating a photonic crystal can be both costly and intricate. However, through the cost-effective process of laser photochemical patterning, one-dimensional tuneable photonic crystals can be easily fabricated, which can act as optical transducers and respond to external stimuli. These photonic crystals of interest are mainly made of a polymer hydrogel material that can host metallic nanoparticles (i.e. silver) in the form of arrays and that has the ability to alter its periodicity in situ but also recover its initial geometrical dimensions, which makes it highly reversible and re-usable. Such responsive photonic crystals can be used for various responsive and tuneable optical devices. We demonstrate simulations of the tuneable photonic crystal through a finite element modelling technique in order to analyse its optical properties by varying the pattern of the nanoparticle arrays. Through the theoretical results that are reported, it is found that the number of stacks inside the polymer medium, as well as the number, size and order of silver nanoparticles per stack can dramatically change the effective refractive index of the system. The results provide valuable insights for the rational design of efficient tuneable photonic crystals systems and devices.