The influence of a power law distribution of cluster size on the light transmission of disordered 1D photonic structures

Abstract: A better understanding of the optical properties of random photonic structures is beneficial for many applications, such as random lasing, optical imaging and photovoltaics. Here we investigated the light transmission properties of disordered photonic structures in which the high refractive index layers are aggregated in clusters. We sorted the size of the clusters from a power law distribution tuning the exponent a of the distribution function. The sorted high refractive layer clusters are randomly distributed within the low refractive index layers. We studied the total light transmission, within the photonic band gap of the corresponding periodic crystal, as a function of the exponent in the distribution. We observed that, for a within the interval [0,3.5], the trend can be fitted with a sigmoidal function.