Abstract

It has been suggested that spontaneous emission can be inhibited if atomic transition frequencies fall inside photonic band gaps, that is, three-dimensional frequency stop bands of electromagnetic waves generated by three-dimensional periodic dielectric materials (photonic crystals). There has been a growing interest in how atomic emission spectra are changed quantitatively inside the photonic crystals. We develop a classical theory for the calculation of the emission power from the electric dipole located in three-dimensional photonic crystals by incorporating the plane-wave method, dyadic Green’s function, Poynting theorem, and tetrahedron k-space integration. With the method we perform numerical computations for the emission power of an electric dipole located in the photonic crystals of the fcc lattice structure with spherical atoms. The results show the total inhibition of emission in the photonic band gap as well as strong enhancement around the band edges. In addition, the data indicate the strong dependencies of the emission spectrum on the dipole position and the dipole moment in the photonic crystal.

© 1995 Optical Society of America

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