An optical fiber-based probe for photonic crystal microcavities

Abstract

We review a novel method for characterizing both the spectral and spatial properties of resonant cavities within two-dimensional photonic crystals (PCs). An optical fiber taper serves as an external waveguide probe whose micron-scale field is used to source and couple light from the cavity modes, which appear as resonant features in the taper's wavelength-dependent transmission spectrum when it is placed within the cavity's near field. Studying the linewidth and depth of these resonances as a function of the taper's position with respect to the resonator produces quantitative measurements of the quality factor Q and modal volume Veff of the resonant cavity modes. Polarization information about the cavity modes can be obtained by studying their depths of coupling when the cavity is probed along different axes by the taper. This fiber-based technique has been used to measure Q ~ 40,000 and Veff ~ 0.9 cubic wavelengths in a graded square lattice PC microcavity fabricated in silicon. The speed and versatility of this fiber-based probe is highlighted, and a discussion of its applicability to other wavelength-scale resonant elements is given.

Submitted to special section on photonic crystals from the PECS-V conference in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (J-SAC), Nanotechnologies for Communications issue

References in corpus (8)

• Experimental demonstration of a high quality factor photonic crystal microcavity
• Rayleigh scattering, mode coupling, and optical loss in silicon microdisks
• Optical-fiber based measurement of an ultra-small volume high-Q photonic crystal microcavity
• Efficient input and output fiber coupling to a photonic crystal waveguide
• Optical loss and lasing characteristics of high-quality-factor AlGaAs microdisk resonators with embedded quantum dots
• Probing the dispersive and spatial properties of planar photonic crystal waveguide modes via highly efficient coupling from optical fiber tapers
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• Feasibility of detecting single atoms using photonic bandgap cavities

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• Observations of interior whispering gallery modes in asymmetric optical resonators with rational caustics
• Coupled fiber taper extraction of 1.53 um photoluminescence from erbium doped silicon nitride photonic crystal cavities