Tuning the photonic stop bands of nanoporous anodic alumina-based distributed bragg reflectors by pore widening.

A distributed Bragg reflector based on nanoporous anodic alumina was fabricated using an innovative cyclic anodization voltage approach, which resulted in an in-depth modulation of the pore geometry and the refractive index. The effect of a pore-widening wet-etching step on the structure's photonic stop-band properties was studied. From transmittance measurements, it was shown that by changing the pore-widening time it is possible to modulate the photonic stop band in the range of visible to near infrared. With the help of a theoretical model, we were able to obtain information about the evolution with the pore widening of the material effective refractive indexes. This opens the possibility of obtaining several optoelectronic devices based on nanoporous anodic alumina.