The collection of articles in this book offers a penetrating shaft into the still burgeoning subject of light propagation and localization in photonic crystals and disordered media. While the subject has its origins in physics, it has broad significance and applicability in disciplines such as engineering, chemistry, mathematics, and medicine. Unlike other branches of physics, where the phenomena under consideration require extreme conditions of temperature, pressure, energy, or isolation from competing effects, the phenomena related to light localization survive under the most ordinary of conditions. This provides the science described in this book with broad applicability and vitality. However, the greatest challenge to the further development of this field is in the reliable and inexpensive synthesis of materials of the required composition, architecture and length scale, where the proper balance between order and disorder is realized.
Similar challenges have been faced and overcome in fields such as semiconductor science and technology. The challenge of photonic crystal synthesis has inspired a variety of novel fabrication protocols such as self-assembly and optical interference lithography that offer much less expensive approaches than conventional semiconductor microlithography.
Once these challenges are fully met, it is likely that light propagation and localization in photonic microstructures will be at the heart of a 21st-century revolution in science and technology.
--From the Introduction, Sajeev John, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada

One of the first books specifically focused on disorder in photonic structures, Optical Properties of Photonic Structures: Interplay of Order and Disorder explores how both order and disorder provide the key to the different regimes of light transport and to the systematic localization and trapping of light. Collecting contributions from leaders of research activity in th

Mikhail F. Limonov is a leading research scientist at the Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a research fellow at the National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics. He has worked for more than 30 years in the optical research community, focusing on various dielectrics, fullerenes, zeolites, superconductors, and photonic crystals.

Richard M. De La Rue is a visiting professor at the University of Malaya and an honorary senior research fellow at the University of Glasgow. He is a fellow of the IEEE, OSA, IET, RSE, and RAEng. His research on photonic-crystal, nanophotonic, and photonic-wire structures has focused on both waveguide microcavities and metamaterials.