Abstract:
Our knowledge of the Universe and its astrophysical processes has improved largely in the last decades thanks to the use of new instruments with high level of accuracy. The technological improvement will be still fundamental to achieve the higher accuracies of the future instruments for the new astrophysical discoveries. In this seminar I will describe a relatively new technology called Photonic Crystals. It has been deeply studied by the physics of matter, but it is poorly known in the astrophysical community. Photonic crystals are periodic dielectric materials that affect the motion of photons in much the same way that ionic lattices affect electrons in solids. I will describe their properties and the possibility to build instruments able to guide the photons and harvest their energy. Finally I will show a possible implementation of this technology for astrophysical observations.