Optical properties of carbon nanofiber photonic crystals

Carbon nanofibers (CNF) are used as components of planar photonic crystals. Square and rectangular lattices and random patterns of vertically aligned CNF were fabricated and their properties studied using ellipsometry. We show that detailed information such as symmetry directions and the band structure of these novel materials can be extracted from considerations of the polarization state in the specular beam. The refractive index of the individual nanofibers was found to be n_CNF = 4.1.