Extremely terahertz electric-field enhancement in a high-Q photonic crystal slab cavity with nanoholes

TL;DR

This paper proposes a high-Q photonic crystal cavity with nanoholes that significantly enhances terahertz electric fields, enabling potential room-temperature THz sources through electromagnetic boundary effects and high Purcell factors.

Contribution

It introduces a novel THz cavity design with nanoholes that achieves unprecedented electric field enhancement and ultra-small mode volume, surpassing traditional photonic crystal cavities.

Findings

Electric field enhancement factor exceeds 10^6

Mode volume is 288 times smaller than regular THz PC cavities

Q factor exceeds 10^4, enabling strong Purcell enhancement

Abstract

A one-dimensional photonic-crystal (PC) cavity with nanoholes is proposed for extremely enhancing the THz electric fields by utilizing the electromagnetic (EM) boundary conditions, where both slot effect (for the perpendicular component of the electric displacement field) and anti-slot effect (for the parallel component of the electric field) contribute to the considerable field enhancement. The EM energy density can be enhanced in the high refractive index material by a factor of ({\epsilon}h/{\epsilon}l)^2, where {\epsilon}h and {\epsilon}l are the permittivities of the high and low refractive index materials, respectively. Correspondingly, the mode volume can be enhanced by a factor of 288 as compared with the regular THz PC cavity and is three orders of magnitude smaller than the diffraction limitation. While the proposed THz cavity design also supports the modes with high Q > 10^4, which lead to strong Purcell enhancement of spontaneous emission by a factor exceeds 10^6. Our THz cavity design is feasible and appealing for experimental demonstrations, since the semiconductor layer where the EM is maximized can naturally be filled with a quantum engineered active materials, which is potential for developing the room-temperature coherent THz radiation sources.