Experimental demonstration of the slow group velocity of light in two-dimensional coupled photonic crystal microcavity arrays

We present the design and fabrication of photonic crystal structures exhibiting electromagnetic bands that are flattened in all crystal directions, i.e., whose frequency variation with wavevector is minimized. Such bands can be used to reduce group velocity of light propagating in arbitrary crystal direction, which is of importance for construction of miniaturized tunable optical delay components, low-threshold photonic crystal lasers, and study of nonlinear optics phenomena.

We demonstrate temporal group delays in coherently-coupled high-Q multi-cavity photonic crystals, in an all-optical analogue to electromagnetically induced transparency. We report deterministic control of the group delay up to 4x the single cavity lifetime in our CMOS-fabricated room-temperature chip. Supported by three-dimensional numerical simulations and theoretical analyses, our multi-pump beam approach enables control of the multi-cavity resonances and inter-cavity phase...

Slow light propagation in structured materials is a highly promising approach for realizing on-chip integrated photonic devices based on enhanced optical nonlinearities. One of the most successful research avenues consists in engineering the band dispersion of light-guiding photonic crystal (PC) structures. The primary goal of such devices is to achieve slow-light operation over the largest possible bandwidth, with large group index, minimal index dispersion, and constant tra...

We investigate the dispersion and transmission property of slow-light coupled-resonator optical waveguides that consist of more than 100 ultrahigh-Q photonic crystal cavities. We show that experimental group-delay spectra exhibited good agreement with numerically calculated dispersions obtained with the three-dimensional plane wave expansion method. Furthermore, a statistical analysis of the transmission property indicated that fabrication fluctuations in individual cavities ...

The problem of slowing down light by orders of magnitude has been extensively discussed in the literature. Such a possibility can be useful in a variety of optical and microwave applications. Many qualitatively different approaches have been explored. Here we discuss how this goal can be achieved in linear dispersive media, such as photonic crystals. The existence of slowly propagating electromagnetic waves in photonic crystals is quite obvious and well known. The main proble...

We have experimentally studied polarization properties of the two-dimensional coupled photonic crystal microcavity arrays, and observed a strong polarization dependence of the transmission and reflection of light from the structures - the effects that can be employed in building miniaturized polarizing optical components. Moreover, by combining these properties with a strong sensitivity of the coupled bands on the surrounding refractive index, we have demonstrated a detection...

A time-resolved analysis of the amplitude and phase of THz pulses propagating through three-dimensional photonic crystals is presented. Single-cycle pulses of THz radiation allow measurements over a wide frequency range, spanning more than an octave below, at and above the bandgap of strongly dispersive photonic crystals. Transmission data provide evidence for slow group velocities at the photonic band edges and for superluminal transmission at frequencies in the gap. Our exp...

The ability of photonic crystal waveguides (PCWs) to confine and slow down light makes them an ideal component to enhance the performance of various photonic devices, such as optical modulators or sensors. However, the integration of PCWs in photonic applications poses design challenges, most notably, engineering the PCW mode dispersion and creating efficient coupling devices. Here, we solve these challenges with photonic inverse design, and experimentally demonstrate a slow-...

Coupling of external light signals into a photonic crystal waveguide becomes increasingly inefficient as the group velocity of the waveguiding mode slows down. We have systematically studied the efficiency of coupling in the slow light regime for samples with different truncations of the photonic lattice at the coupling interface. Inverse power law dependence is found to best fit the experimental scaling of the coupling loss on the group index. Coupling efficiency is found to...

We performed an experimental study of coupled optical cavity arrays in a photonic crystal platform. We find that the coupling between the cavities is significantly larger than the fabrication-induced disorder in the cavity frequencies. Satisfying this condition is necessary for using such cavity arrays to generate strongly correlated photons, which has potential application to the quantum simulation of many-body systems.