Optically triggered Q-switched photonic crystal laser

Abstract

An optically triggered liquid crystal infiltrated Q-switched photonic crystal laser is demonstrated. A photonic crystal laser cavity was designed and fabricated to support two orthogonally polarized high-Q cavity modes after liquid crystal infiltration. By controlling the liquid crystal orientation via a layer of photoaddressable polymer and a writing laser, the photonic crystal lasing mode can be reversibly switched between the two modes which also switches the laser's emission polarization and wavelength. The creation of the Q-switched laser demonstrates the benefits of customizing photonic crystal cavities to maximally synergize with an infiltrated material and illustrates the potential of integrating semiconductor nanophotonics with optical materials. ©2005 Optical Society of America References and Links1. E. Yablonovitch, "Inhibited spontaneous emission in solid-state physics and electronics," Phys. Rev. Lett. 58, 2059Lett. 58, -2062Lett. 58, , (1987. 2. S. John, "Strong localization of photons in certain disordered dielectric superlattices," Phys. Rev. Lett. 58, 2486Lett. 58, -2489Lett. 58, , (1987. 3. Y. Akahane, T. Asano, B. Song, and S. Noda, "High-Q photonic nanocavity in a two-dimensional photonic crystal," Nature 425, 944-947, (2003). Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 967-970, (1999). 12. E. Yablonovitch, "Liquid versus photonic crystals," Nature 401, 539-541, (1999

InP-based planar photonic crystals infiltrated with solid polymers and liquid crystals

“…Several groups have already pursued the tuning of 2D PhC by infiltrating the holes with a Liquid Crystal [3][4][5][6][7][8][9] , following the original suggestion by Busch and John 10 . While the tuning capabilities of Liquid Crystals are not likely to be surpassed by any other dielectric, their relatively slow response, anisotropy, or liquid state could make them unsuitable for some applications.…”

Wavelength tuning of planar photonic crystals by local processing of individual holes

“…Recently, significant progress has been made on post-production tuning of photonic crystals and cavities. As a means of trimming or tuning, complete infiltration of the PC was carried out with materials such as liquid crystals (LC) [3,4,5,6,7,8,9], polymers [10,11,12] and chalcogenide glass [13]. With these methods, it is possible to red-shift the spectral features of the original PC device, since the air inside the holes is replaced with a material with a higher refractive index.…”

Liquid Crystals into Planar Photonic Crystals

“…In particular, the potential of PhC infiltration with nematic liquid crystals (LCs) has been largely demonstrated for one-, two-and three-dimensional (1D, 2D and 3D) PhCs. Therefore, besides their classical fields of application, LCs are also having a strong impact in the PhC field (Busch & John, 1999;Yoshino et al, 1999b;Leonard et al, 2000;Kang et al, 2001;Shimoda et al, 2001;Kubo et al, 2002;Mertens et al, 2002;Gottardo et al, 2003;Mertens et al, 2003;Schuller et al, 2003;Weiss & Fauchet, 2003;Busch et al, 2004;Du et al, 2004;Kubo et al, 2004;Martz et al, 2004;Maune et al, 2004;Kosmidou et al, 2005;Lourtioz et al, 2005;Maune et al, 2005;Weiss et al, 2005a-b;Ferrini et al, 2006;Haurylau et al, 2006b;.…”

“…In Section 4, we will show how the optical response of PhC devices infiltrated with nematic LCs can be tuned by temperature, electric field and optical irradiation El-Kallassi et al, 2007). In particular, we observe that, in spite of a large amount of research on LC infiltrated PhCs, little has been done on their optical tuning (Maune et al, 2005), even though all-optical switching plays a very important role in the optical communication field (Asakawa et al, 2006) and, as we have briefly discussed above, several other approaches have already been explored to optically tune planar PhCs (Ndi et al, 2005;Raineri et al, 2005;Teo et al, 2006;Tanabe et al, 2007). Here, we will illustrate how it is possible to optically tune the response of planar PhC devices by infiltration with a photo-responsive LC blend doped with azobenzene photochromic molecules (Legge & Mitchell, 1992;Sung et al, 2002;Ikeda, 2003).…”