In our paper, published in PNAS, we show how to construct a foam-based photonic crystal with a substantial band gap using the famous Weaire-Phelan foam.
M. A. Klatt, P. J. Steinhardt, S. Torquato. Phoamtonic designs yield sizeable 3D photonic band gaps. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 116:23480–23486 (2019)
A report by Steven Schultz about our study has been featured on the main webpage of Princeton University:
See also, the original post of the engineering department:
https://engineering.princeton.edu/news/2019/11/15/foam-offers-way-manipulate-light
The Weaire-Phelan foam has the smallest surface area among all known tessellations with equal-volume cells. While it has only a slightly smaller surface area than the Kelvin foam. Its corresponding photonic network provides a distinctly larger band gap and a much smaller critical refractive index. To determine the latter, we have created a detailed map of gap sizes.
Among the promising prospects that phoamtonics offers for applications are multifunctional characteristics, the self-organization of large photonic networks, and a high degree of isotropy.
We published all data generated or analyzed for our phoamtonics study, including configurations, parameter files, raw output, and postprocessed data, in a Zenodo
repository (https://zenodo.org/). DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3401635
Michael Andreas Klatt 