Investigation of Photonic Crystal Nanobeams for Resonator Coupling, Modal Fingerprinting and Wavelength Filtering

Photonic crystals are often referred to as “the semiconductors of light”. As semiconductors have revolutionized the electronics industry, photonic crystals have shown immense potential to control light for a variety of nanophotonic applications, including routing, wavelength filtering, slow-light, quantum optics, signal modulation and lasing. By embedding photonic crystals into traditional waveguides, we can create a class of devices known as photonic crystal nanobeams (PCNs). With PCNs, we can realize incredibly compact devices on the order of ~10μm2 with the potential to confine light strongly in both space and time. While PCNs have record breaking metrics for spatial and temporal confinement of light, these properties are strongly dependent on the optical mode order excited in the PCN. This work explores methods to improve the efficiency of coupling power to high-performance PCN modes and reliably identify modes using an infrared camera. This work also explores using a PCN for wavelength filtering applications in a monolithic photonics technology to assist in the development of cutting edge optical interconnects.