The great interest in photonic crystals and their applications in the last 15 years is being expressed in the publishing of a large number of monographs, collections, textbooks and tutorials, where existing knowledge concerning operation principles of photonic crystal devices and microstructured fibers, their mathematical description, well-known and novel applications of such technologies in photonics and optical communications are presented. They challenges authors of new books to cover the gaps still existing in the literature and highlight and popularize of already known material in a new and original manner.

Authors of this book believe that the next step towards wide application of photonic crystals is the solution of many practical problems of design and computation of the specific photonic crystal-based devices aimed at the specific technical application. In order to make this step, it is necessary to increase the number of practitioners who can solve such problems independently. The aim of this book is to extend the group of researchers, developers and students, who could practically use the knowledge on the physics of photonic crystals together with the knowledge and skills of independent calculation of basic characteristics of photonic crystals and modeling of various elements of integrated circuits and optical communication systems created on the basis of photonic crystals.

The book is intended for qualified readers, specialists in the field of optics and photonics, students of higher courses, master degree students and PhD students. As an introduction to the snopest, the book contains the basics of wave optics and radiation propagation in simple guiding media such as planar waveguides and step-index fibers. Relying on fundamental laws and models, we give descriptions of physical principles of light propagation inside 1D, 2D and 3D photonic crystals and microstructured fibers. Detailed explanations of the basic terms used in photonic crystal physics, such as reciprocal lattice vectors, Brilluoin zone, matrix eigen-vectors and eigen-states, basis functions, etc. are given.