Slow light engineering in a photonic crystal slab waveguide through optofluidic infiltration and geometric modulation

Abstract

In this paper, a new type of flat-band slow light structure with high group index (n_g) and large normalized delay-bandwidth product (NDBP) in a silicon on insulator (SOI) based photonic crystal (PC) slab waveguide with a triangular lattice of circular holes is demonstrated. The dispersion engineering is performed by infiltrating optical fluids with different refractive indices n_f in the first row and shifting the second row of air holes adjacent to the PC waveguide (PCW) in the longitudinal direction. In the optimized case, a high NDBP of 0.32 with a group index of 54.55 and a bandwidth of 9.13 nm could be obtained. Furthermore, an ultra-low group velocity dispersion (GVD) in the range of 10^–20 s²/m is achieved in all of the structures. These results are obtained by numerical simulations based on three-dimensional (3D) plane wave expansion (PWE) method.