Negative refraction in photonic crystals

We demonstrate that light propagation in strongly modulated 2D/3D photonic crystals (PhCs) becomes refraction-like in the vicinity of the photonic bandgap, which is contrary to the fact that light propagation in weakly modulated PhCs is very different from refraction and thus the definition of refraction index becomes meaningless. Such a crystal behaves like a material having an effective refractive index controllable by the band structure. This situation is analogous to the effective-mass approximation in electron-band theory. The propagation states having a negative effective index exhibit unusual properties, such as mirror-like imaging effect, image-transfer effect. These properties are confirmed by finite-difference time-domain simulations.