  Carbon nanofibers (CNF) are used as components of planar photonic crystals.
Square and rectangular lattices and random patterns of vertically aligned CNF
were fabricated and their properties studied using ellipsometry. We show that
detailed information such as symmetry directions and the band structure of
these novel materials can be extracted from considerations of the polarization
state in the specular beam. The refractive index of the individual nanofibers
was found to be n_CNF = 4.1.
