Two physical mechanisms for boosting the quality factor to cavity volume ratio of photonic crystal microcavities

Philippe Lalanne (1) , Solène Mias (1) , Jean-Paul Hugonin (1)

1 Laboratoire Charles Fabry de l'Institut d'Optique / Naphel

We identify two physical mechanisms which drastically increase the Q/V factor of photonic crystal microcavities. Both mechanisms rely on a fine tuning the geometry of the holes around the cavity defect. The first mechanism relies on engineering the mirrors in order to reduce the out-ofplane far field radiation. The second mechanism is less intuitive and relies on a pure electromagnetism effect based on transient fields at the subwavelength scale, namely a recycling of the mirror losses by radiation modes. The recycling mechanism enables the design of high-performance microresonators with moderate requirements on the mirror reflectivity. Once the geometry around the defect is optimised, both mechanisms are shown to strongly impact the Q and the Purcell factors of the microcavity.

Domains: Optics [physics.optics]

Philippe Lalanne, Solène Mias, Jean-Paul Hugonin. Two physical mechanisms for boosting the quality factor to cavity volume ratio of photonic crystal microcavities. Optics Express, 2004, 12 (3), pp.458-467. ⟨hal-00868862⟩