Photonic Crystals#
Photonic crystals utilize periodic optical nanostructures to affect the motion of photons in a similar manner to the way periodic potentials in a semiconductor crystal affect electrons. In this section, we demonstrate the methods to calculate a photonic crystal’s band structure and simulate both the mode profile and the quality factor of a photonic crystal cavity. These tasks are efficiently accomplished using Tidy3D’s ResonanceFinder plugin, which is designed to extract mode decays directly from the time-domain field data.