Design and Optical Studies of Photonic Components Using Slow Light Properties « Conception et Etudes Optiques de Composants Photoniques en Utilisant Les Propriétés de Lumière Lente »

Abstract

Photonic crystals (PhCs) are artificially constructed periodic arrangements of dielectric materials. The discovery of photonic crystals with a photonic band gap, has opened up new methods for controlling light, leading to proposals for many novel devices. An important element of optical circuits is a linear waveguide to carry light to and from components, in addition, photonic crystals provide unique advantages for waveguides. Photonic-crystal waveguides, guided by the band gap of the PhC and it is one of the most suitable and attractive structures for realizing the slow light effect, because such a line defect structure operates at room temperature and has a high potential for on-chip integration by modifying the initial PhC structure. Slow light promotes a stronger light–matter interaction; it offers additional control over the spectral bandwidth of the interaction, and it allows us to delay and temporarily store light in all-optical memories. In this context, the aim of this thesis is to study and design two photonic crystal waveguides PCW1 and PCW2 designed to achieve slow light in the flat band region of guided modes with large normalized delay bandwidth product (NDBP) while maintaining smaller values of group velocity dispersion. To further test the applicability of our waveguide PCW2, the buffering capacity is calculated, which is found to be as high as 148 bits on the assumption that the device length is L=1mm. The reported results can be useful in making on-chip optical buffers and delay lines.