Triply periodic bicontinuous structures through interference lithography: a level-set approach

Interference lithography holds the promise of fabricating large-area, defect-free photonic structures on the sub-micrometer scale both rapidly and cheaply. There is a need for a procedure to establish a connection between the structures that are formed and the parameters of the interfering beams. There is also a need to produce self-supporting three-dimensional bicontinuous structures. A generic technique correlating parameters of the interfering beams with the symmetry elements present in the resultant structures by a level-set approach is developed. A particular space group is ensured by equating terms of the intensity equation to a representative level surface of the desired space group. Single- and multiple-exposure techniques are discussed. The beam parameters for certain cubic bicontinuous structures relevant to photonic crystals, viz., the diamond (D), the simple cubic (P), and the chiral gyroid (G) are derived by utilizing either linear or elliptically polarized light. (C) 2003 Optical Society of America.