TABLE OF CONTENTS Artificial superlattices are engineered microstructures. Like bulk materials, they can be divided according to their constituents into several categories: semiconductor, metallic, dielectric, etc. These new materials show many unusual behaviors, which are of fundamental interest in physics and have potential applications in microelectronics. In the past several decades, the most studied are the semiconductor and metallic superlattices. With the development of modern science and technology, research on dielectric superlattices (DSLs) has been possible only recently. As is well known, In dielectric crystals, the most important physical processes are the propagation and excitation of classical waves (optical and acoustic waves). The propagation of classical waves in a DSL (classical system) is similar to the electron motion in a periodic potential of crystal lattice (quantum system). Thus, some ideas in solid state electronics, for example, the reciprocal space, Brillouin zone, dispersion relation, and the like, may be used in classical wave processes. Such is the case for photonic crystal (Yablonovitch, 1987), which is important for applications such as suppressing spontaneous emission, novel laser geometries, etc (Joannopoulos, et al., 1995). Associated with the photonic crystal is the variation of dielectric constants. Another DSL, a periodic elastic composite known as the phononic crystal, has also attracted much interest (Espinosa, et al., 1998). Apart from the band structure, attention has been paid to phenomena such as Anderson localization and possible applications such as acoustic filters and new transducers (Kushwaha, et al., 1994; Sigalas, 1997). The modulation parameters may not...
