Manipulating light with strongly modulated photonic crystals

Abstract

Recently, strongly modulated photonic crystals, fabricated by the state-of-the-art semiconductor nanofabrication process, have realized various novel optical properties. This paper describes the way in which they differ from other optical media, and clarifies what they can do. In particular, three important issues are considered: light confinement, frequency dispersion and spatial dispersion. First, I describe the latest status and impact of ultra-strong light confinement in a wavelength-cubic volume achieved in photonic crystals. Second, the extreme reduction in the speed of light is reported, which was achieved as a result of frequency dispersion management. Third, strange negative refraction in photonic crystals is introduced, which results from their unique spatial dispersion, and it is clarified how this leads to perfect imaging. The last two sections are devoted to applications of these novel properties. First, I report the fact that strong light confinement and huge light-matter interaction enhancement make strongly modulated photonic crystals promising for on-chip all-optical processing, and present several examples including all-optical switches/memories and optical logics. As a second application, it is shown that the strong light confinement and slow light in strongly modulated photonic crystals enable the adiabatic tuning of light, which leads to various novel ways of controlling light, such as adiabatic frequency conversion, efficient optomechanics systems, photon memories and photons pinning.

Two-Photon Interference from the Far-Field Emission of Chip-Integrated Cavity-Coupled Emitters

“…[22][23][24][25] Emitters coupled to cavities can also serve as highly nonlinear devices operating at low photon numbers, 26 as well as efficient interfaces between photons and solid-state quantum memory. 27,28 The majority of the work to-date focused on a single emitter in a cavity, which can exhibit nearly perfect single photon purity and indistinguishability using resonant pumping techniques.…”

Robustness and fragility of photonic bandgap in photonic amorphous diamond structures

“…More specifically, the CRN structure constructed by Barkema and Mousseau [22] was used, which is characterized by a high degree of local regular-tetrahedron order and by the complete absence of lattice periodicity. This CRN structure, and therefore the PAD structure, consists of a periodic arrangement of cubic supercells with a size of (11.5d) 3 (d: average bond length). The radius (r 0 ) of the rods was set as r 0 /d = 0.26, resulting in an air volume fraction of 78%.…”

“…The time evolutions at each position is then Fourier transformed into the frequency domain to obtain the PDOS and eigenmodes. For pd-, f-, and ds-PAD structures, the calculations were made for a periodic supercell structure of size (11.5d) 3 . On the other hand, for ds-PCDs, we used a crystalline diamond structure with a fictitious supercell (5a 0 ) 3 = (11.5d) 3 , where a 0 ¼ 4d= ffiffi ffi 3 p denotes the lattice constant of the crystalline diamond.…”

“…For pd-, f-, and ds-PAD structures, the calculations were made for a periodic supercell structure of size (11.5d) 3 . On the other hand, for ds-PCDs, we used a crystalline diamond structure with a fictitious supercell (5a 0 ) 3 = (11.5d) 3 , where a 0 ¼ 4d= ffiffi ffi 3 p denotes the lattice constant of the crystalline diamond. The use of the fictitious supercell structure for ds-PCDs enables us to compare the results obtained under exactly the same conditions for ds-PADs and ds-PCDs.…”

“…A 3D PBG was predicted to enable 3D light confinement within a volume comparable to the wavelength without substantial loss, which is difficult to achieve with other media. Such strong light confinement is expected to lead to the development of novel types of efficient, minuscule optical devices [3].…”