Photonic band gap materials are solids that strongly diffract light, ideally at visible and near-infrared wavelengths. They are ordered dielectric structures, such as silica-air or titania-polymer, with sub-micron periodic length scales. Many exciting applications have been proposed for these materials, including cavities for thresholdless lasing, planar waveguiding, and photon localization. Our group's efforts in this area began only in 1998, when graduate student Peng Jiang began to explore better ways to form silica colloidal films. Since …showed first 75 words of 3338 total…

…showed last 75 words of 3338 total…field and to stimulate the research in this important area of optical physics. Topics to be covered by this feature issue include ·Lasing in PBG structures ·Harmonic generation, wave mixing, and related phenomena ·Nonlinear optics with photonic-crystal fibers and waveguides ·Optical switching and limiting ·Ultrafast optics and ultrashort pulses in nonlinear photonic crystals ·Novel PBG materials for nonlinear optics ·Light manipulation and light- control-by-light ·Solitons in PBG structures ·New methods of modeling and numerical simulations