Design, fabrication and transmitted properties of terahertz paper photonic crystals

The terahertz paper photonic crystals, including one-dimensional stacks, two-dimensional square and hexagonal lattices as well as three-dimensional body-centered cubic lattice, are designed and fabricated. Femtosecond laser direct writing is employed to process paper layers. The transmission properties of these photonic crystals in THz range are characterized using time-domain THz spectroscopy. The experimental results are in good agreement with the numerical simulations and well explained by the photonic band-structure calculated by the plane wave expansion method. Our results demonstrate that paper photonic crystals have a good performance on molding the flow of THz radiation. From another point of view, the fabrication method proposed in this work can be widely extended to manufacture different micro-structures on various materials.