Achieving centimetre-scale supercollimation in a large-area two-dimensional photonic crystal

Diffraction, a fundamental process in wave physics, leads to spreading of the optical beams as they propagate. However, new photonic crystal (PhC) meta-materials can be nano-engineered to generate extreme anisotropy, resulting in apparent propagation of light without diffraction. This surprising phenomenon, called supercollimation, effectively freezes the spatial width of a light beam inside a PhC, observed over a few isotropic diffraction-lengths. However, using such experiments to predict the behaviour for longer propagation lengths is difficult, as a tiny error in a measured width can extrapolate to order unity uncertainty in the width at distances over hundreds of diffraction-lengths. Here, supercollimation is demonstrated in a macroscopic PhC system over centimetre-scale distances, retaining spatial width confinement without the need for waveguides or nonlinearities. Through quantitative studies of the beam evolution in a two-dimensional PhC, we find that supercollimation possesses unexpected but inherent robustness with respect to short-scale disorder such as fabrication roughness, enabling supercollimation over 600 isotropic diffraction-lengths. The effects of disorder are identified through experiments and understood through rigorous simulations. In addition, a supercollimation steering capability is proposed.