Study of nonlinear effects in photonic crystals doped with nanoparticles

A theory of nonlinear phenomena has been developed for a photonic crystal in the presence of a pump and a coupling laser field. The crystal is doped with an ensemble of four-level nanoparticle impurities. It is considered that the impurity particles are not only interacting with the photonic crystal but also with each other via dipole-dipole interaction. An expression for the susceptibility has been obtained using the density matrix method. The nonlinear effects due to the coupling and the pump fields have been included in the formulation. The absorption spectrum has been calculated in the presence of the strong coupling and pump fields for an isotropic photonic crystal made from dielectric spheres. The photonic crystal has a gap to midgap ratio of about 21%. It is predicted that the absorption spectrum in the photonic crystal can have zero, one, two or three absorptionless states by tuning one of the transition energies within the bands. This is an interesting phenomenon which can be used to make photonic switching devices. We have also calculated the absorption spectrum in the presence of the dipole-dipole interaction. It is found that a symmetric absorption spectrum changes to an asymmetric one due to this interaction. It is also found that there is a large enhancement in the absorption and the dispersion simultaneously for certain values of the detuning and concentration.