Effective Photonic Pseudogap of a Two-Phase Composite Opaline Photonic Crystal

We report the observation of suppression of the green photoluminescence from an optically active ZnO-infiltrated composite opal fabricated by electrodeposition templated on a self-assembled polystyrene opal. This is interpreted to be the consequence of an effective photonic pseudogap formed by the composite opaline photonic crystal. The effective pseudogap’s effect on emission of the composite opal, one ‘raw’ and one ‘inverted’, is simply the addition of the effect of each component opal, with no noticeable interaction effect, thus suggesting a simple route for engineering the photonic behavior of heterogeneous photonic crystals.