Improved design and experimental demonstration of ultrahigh-Q C${}_{\text{6}}$-symmetric H1 hexapole photonic crystal nanocavities

Abstract

An H1 photonic crystal nanocavity is based on a single point defect and has eigenmodes with a variety of symmetric features. Thus, it is a promising building block for photonic tight-binding lattice systems that can be used in studies on condensed matter, non-Hermitian and topological physics. However, improving its radiative quality ($Q$) factor has been considered challenging. Here, we report the design of a hexapole mode of an H1 nanocavity with a $Q$ factor exceeding $10^8$. We achieved such extremely high-$Q$ conditions by designing only four structural modulation parameters thanks to the ${\mathrm{C}}_6$ symmetry of the mode, despite the need of more complicated optimizations for many other nanocavities. The fabricated silicon photonic crystal nanocavities exhibited a systematic change in their resonant wavelengths depending on the spatial shift of the air holes in units of 1 nm. Out of 26 such samples, we found eight cavities with loaded $Q$ factors over one million ($1.2\times 10^6$ maximum). We examined the difference between the theoretical and experimental performances by conducting a simulation of systems with input and output waveguides and with randomly distributed radii of air holes. Automated optimization using the same design parameters further increased the theoretical $Q$ factor by up to $4.5\times 10^8$, which is two orders of magnitude higher than in the previous studies. Our work elevates the performance of the H1 nanocavity to the ultrahigh-$Q$ level and paves the way for its large-scale arrays with unconventional functionalities.

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• Scheme to Achieve Silicon Topological Photonics
• Active topological photonics
• Ultralow mode-volume photonic crystal nanobeam cavities for high efficiency coupling to individual carbon nanotube emitters