LAUSR

Uncovering how disorder affects light propagation is a key step to manipulating light transportation and localization utilizing engineered disorder in photonics. Herein, we study the disorder-induced localization, delocalization and inter-transition between them in the regions of photonic band gaps (PBGs) and their associated passbands of one-dimensional (1D) Photonic crystals (PhCs) under different types of disorder effect. We introduce two parameters to quantitatively evaluate how disorder effect can be exploited to tailor the localization and delocalization of light in 1D PhCs. Such parameters can clearly indicate the inter-transition between extended states and localized states. It is shown that both nontrivial and trivial disorder-induced transport scenarios exist depending on the types of disorder introduced to the otherwise periodic system. The disorder-induced band tailing, which is correlated with the disorder-induced redistribution of electric energy compared with periodic case, is crucial for observing these interesting disorder-induced light transportation scenarios. Our results might provide positive insight to the manipulation of light transmission in nanophotonics by engineered disorder.