High Extraction Efficiency of Spontaneous Emission from Slabs of Photonic Crystals

A thin slab of two-dimensional photonic crystal is shown to alter drastically the radiation pattern of spontaneous emission. More specifically, by eliminating all guided modes at the transition frequencies, spontaneous emission can be coupled entirely to free space modes, resulting in a greatly enhanced extraction efficiency. Such structures might provide a solution to the long-standing problem of poor light extraction from high refractive-index semiconductors in light-emitting diodes.