Light-opal interaction

This animation by Antonino Calà Lesina and collaborators shows the interaction of a plane-wave optical pulse with a face-centered cubic photonic crystal (opals), formed by a lattice of polystyrene spheres of radius 118 nm with a filling factor of 0.74. A multi-frequency analysis is performed with an in-house Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) parallel code to calculate the transmittance and reflectance. The transmittance shows a band-gap around 550 nm, indicating that the propagation of the green component of the optical spectrum is forbidden. The simulations were performed on the IBM Blue Gene/Q at SciNet (Compute Canada / SOSCIP).