The Effect of Symmetry Breaking in Coupled Cavity Photonic Crystal Waveguide on Dispersion Characteristics

TL;DR

This paper investigates how breaking symmetry with auxiliary rods in photonic crystal waveguides affects dispersion, enabling enhanced slow light, bandwidth, and rainbow trapping for advanced optical signal processing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method of symmetry breaking using auxiliary rods to tune dispersion and bandwidth in photonic crystal waveguides, demonstrating significant improvements.

Findings

Group index maximization with symmetry breaking.

Bandwidth and group bandwidth product increased by 675%.

Effective rainbow trapping achieved through auxiliary rod manipulation.

Abstract

In this study, we explore the effect of integrated auxiliary rods at varying angles to the primary cavity rod on the dispersion characteristics of the photonic crystal coupled cavity waveguide (PC CCW). Here, it is intended to break the symmetry of the cavity region by introducing auxiliary rods which gives the degree of freedom for tuning effective index of the PC waveguide. Furthermore, rotational angle variations of auxiliary rods reveal slow light operation of the PC CCW where the group index is maximized and group velocity dispersion, as well as the third-order dispersion, are minimized. In addition, auxiliary rods with a broken symmetry increase not only group index but also operating bandwidth and accordingly increase group bandwidth product by 675\%. Leveraging these results, we demonstrate effective rainbow trapping by manipulating the auxiliary rod angles in photonic crystal coupled cavity waveguides. Our results have encouraging implications for optical buffering, multiplexing, demultiplexing, advanced time-domain and spatial signal processing.