Corrugated nanowires as distributed Bragg reflectors

Abstract Distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs), comprised of periodic refractive index changes, are widely used in optoelectronic devices as resonators, filters and sensors. The heterostructures required for DBRs can be difficult to implement in nanostructures due to poor compositional control on the nanoscale. In the present paper, simulation results are presented of the reflectance spectra from DBR structures that are implemented using periodic perturbations of a nanowire (NW) diameter, rather than heterostructures. The corrugated NW structure can produce a DBR stopband with reflectance near unity. The Bragg wavelength and stopband can be tuned by adjusting the pitch of the nanowire arrays, the corrugation depth, and the period of the corrugation. The proposed DBR structure presents a new paradigm for a wide range of nanoscale device applications.