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Updated: Aug 14, 2026

Fabrication And Characterization Of Photonic Crystal Slow Light Waveguides And Cavities
Published on: November 30, 2012
Optical waveguiding in suspensions of dielectric particles
Richard S Conroy1, Brian T Mayers, Dmitri V Vezenov
1Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 62138, USA. rconroy@fas.harvard.edu
Abstract:
An optical waveguide formed by a suspension of dielectric nanoparticles in a microchannel is described. The suspensions, chosen for their guiding and scattering properties, are silica and polystyrene particles that have diameters of 30-900 nm and are dispersed in water with volume fractions up to 10%. Changing the diameter and concentration of the particles causes the suspensions to transition from Rayleigh to Mie scattering and from single to multiple scattering. The threshold for optical guiding in a waveguide core composed of these suspensions is set by the numerical aperture of the effective refractive-index difference introduced by the suspension and not by the average interparticle distance.
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