Dispersion and light transport characteristics of large-scale photonic-crystal coupled nanocavity arrays

TL;DR

This paper studies the dispersion and light transport in large-scale photonic crystal cavity arrays, demonstrating good agreement between experiments and simulations, and analyzing fabrication effects on transmission properties in extensive cavity chains.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed experimental and numerical analysis of dispersion and transmission in large-scale photonic crystal coupled nanocavity arrays with over 100 cavities.

Findings

Experimental group-delay spectra match numerical dispersion calculations.

Fabrication fluctuations are less impactful in extended cavity chains.

Behavior observed in chains of up to 400 cavities.

Abstract

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 are less relevant than in the localized regime. These behaviors are observed for a chain of up to 400 cavities.