Light scattering in disordered honeycomb photonic lattices near the Dirac points

Abstract

We address Anderson localization in disordered honeycomb photonic lattices and show that the localization process is strongly affected by the spectral position of the input wavepacket within the first Brillouin zone of the lattice. In spite of the fact that in regular lattice the expansion of the beam is much stronger for the excitation near the Dirac points, where light exhibits conical diffraction, than for the excitation at the center of the Brillouin zone, where the beam exhibits normal diffraction, we found that disorder leads to pronounced Anderson localization even around the Dirac points. We found that for the same disorder level the width of the averaged output intensity distribution for excitations around the Dirac points may be substantially larger than that for excitations at the center of the Brillouin zone.