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The aim of this work is to determine the varying dielectric constant of a biological nanostructured system via electrostatic force microscopy (EFM) and to show how this method is useful to study natural photonic crystals. We mapped the dielectric constant of the cross section of the posterior wing of the damselfly Chalcopteryx rutilans with nanometric resolution. We obtained structural information on its constitutive nanolayers and the absolute values of their dielectric constant. By relating the measured profile of the static dielectric constant to the profile of the refractive index in the visible range, combined with optical reflectance measurements and simulation, we were able to describe the origin of the strongly iridescent wing colors of this Amazonian rainforest damselfly. The method we demonstrate here should be useful for the study of other biological nanostructured systems.

We optimize a silica-encapsulated silicon L3 photonic crystal cavity for ultra-high quality factor by means of a global optimization strategy, where the closest holes surrounding the cavity are varied to minimize out-of-plane losses. We find an optimal value of $$Q_c=4.33\times 10^7$$ Q c = 4.33 × 10 7 , which is predicted to be in the 2 million regime in presence of structural imperfections compatible with state-of-the-art silicon fabrication tolerances.

Using a semi-analytic guided-mode expansion technique, we present theory and analysis of intrinsic propagation losses for topological photonic crystal slab waveguide structures with modified honeycomb lattices of circular or triangular holes. Although conventional photonic crystal waveguide structures, such as the W1 waveguide, have been designed to have lossless propagation modes, they are prone to disorder-induced losses and backscattering. Topological structures have been proposed to help mitigate this effect as their photonic edge states may allow for topological protection. However, the intrinsic propagation losses of these structures are not well understood and the concept of the light line can become blurred. For four example topological edge state structures, photonic band diagrams, loss parameters, and electromagnetic fields of the guided modes are computed. Two of these structures, based on armchair edge states, are found to have significant intrinsic losses for modes inside the photonic band gap, more than 100 dB/cm, which is comparable to or larger than typical disorder-induced losses using slow-light modes in conventional photonic crystal waveguides, while the other two structures, using the valley Hall effect and inversion symmetry, are found to have a good bandwidth for exploiting lossless propagation modes below the light line., 10 pages, 9 figures

Technological advances allow the control of light at the nanoscale and to strongly enhance the light–matter interaction in highly engineered devices. Enhancing the light–matter interaction is needed for applications in research areas such as quantum technology, energy harvesting, sensing, and biophotonics. Here, we show that a different approach, based on the use of disorder, rather than the precise engineering of the devices, and fabrication imperfections as a resource, can allow the efficient trapping of visible light on a chip. We demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, Anderson localization of light at visible wavelengths in a nanophotonic chip. Remarkably, we prove that disorder-induced localization is more efficient in confining visible light than highly engineered optical cavities, thus reversing the trend observed so far. We measure light-confinement quality factors approaching 10 000 that are significantly higher than values previously reported in two-dimensional photonic crystal cavities. These measurements are well explained using a three-dimensional Bloch mode expansion technique, where we also extract the mode quality factors and effective mode volume distributions of the localized modes. Furthermore, by implementing a sensitive imaging technique, we directly visualize the localized modes and measure their spatial extension. Even though the position where the cavities appear is not controlled, given the multiple scattering process at the basis of their formation, we are able to locate with nanometer-scale accuracy the position of the optical cavities. This is important for the deterministic coupling of emitters to the disorder-induced optical cavities and for assessing light localization. Our results show the potential of disorder as a novel resource for the efficient confinement of light and for the enhancement of the light–matter interaction in the visible range of wavelengths.

In the recent past, considerable progress has been made in the optimization of various figures of merit of photonic crystal cavities (PhC) and waveguides [1–5], leading to record performance in terms of quality factors in various materials [6,7], broad band slow light [8], second and third harmonic generation [9, 10]. Here, by combining large scale numerical simulations to a hybrid stochastic-global optimization strategy, we demonstrate that there is still considerable room for further improvement of these figures of merit when increasing the size of the optimization parameter space. In particular, we optimize a silicon-on-air L3 PhC cavity to a quality factor Q > 80 × 106. While this result may have limited impact on applications, as the fabrication disorder sets a statistical upper bound of roughly Q ∼ 4 × 106, we show that the same optimization strategy leads to unprecedented results for buried Si/SiO 2 PhC cavities, where we demonstrate a theoretical Q-factor in the 10 million range. This result sets a new record for the L3 cavity and opens the way to a new class of optimized PhC designs for monolithic structures or for structures made of low-index-contrast materials, such as AlN, GaN or silicon nitride, holding great promise for enhanced optical nonlinearity, sensing, and solid-state quantum optics.

We formulate the theory of Kerr-frequency combs and dissipative Kerr solitons in coupled-cavity waveguides in presence of 2-photon absorption. We apply it to a band-engineered photonic crystal coupled-cavity waveguide in silicon at telecom wavelength.

We describe some recent developments in the efficient modelling of light-matter interactions in plasmonics and nanophotonics. In particular, we describe an efficient finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method to compute regularized quasinormal modes in resonant photonic structures, which have a wide range of applications in classical and quantum nanophotonics, and present methods to compute disorder-induced localization modes (Anderson localization) in slow light photonic crystal waveguides.

The iridescent wings of the Chalcopterix rutilans damselfly (Rambur) (Odonata, Polythoridae) are investigated with focused ion beam/scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry. The electron microscopy images reveal a natural photonic crystal as the source of the varying colors. The photonic crystal has a consistent number and thickness (∼195 nm) of the repeat units on the ventral side of the wing, which is consistent with the red color visible from the bottom side of the wing in all regions. The dorsal side of the wing shows strong color variations ranging from red to blue depending on the region. In the electron microscopy images, the dorsal side of the wing exhibits varied number and thicknesses of the repeat units. The repeat unit spacings for the red, yellow/green, and blue regions are approximately 195, 180, and 145 nm, respectively. Three-dimensional analysis of the natural photonic crystals by time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry reveals that changes in the relative levels of Na, K, and eumelanin are responsible for the varying dielectric constant needed to generate the photonic crystal. The photonic crystal also appears to be assembled with a chemical tricomponent layer structure due to the enhancement of the CH6N3+ species at every other interface between the high/low dielectric constant layers.

Quantifying the radiative coupling between distant quantum emitters can be relevant for applications in quantum information processing on chip. Here we focus on semiconductor quantum dots embedded in photonic crystal dimers formed by two nominally identical L3 cavities, and we show that the effective radiative coupling between them is relatively robust against non-perfect quantum dot positioning and also, to a smaller extent, to structural disorder in the photonic crystal. We show that the coupling between the quantum dots is enhanced at resonance with the dimer photonic modes and is proportional to the quality factors of these modes as long as the two cavities are strongly coupled. We find that, for the configuration where the L3 defects are aligned along the horizontal axis, the radiative coupling is almost two times larger than the values obtained in previous work.

We present a detailed theoretical study of the effects of structural disorder on LN photonic crystal slab cavities, ranging from short to long length scales, using a fully-3D Bloch mode expansion technique. We compute the optical density of states, quality factors and effective mode volumes of the cavity modes, with and without disorder, and compare with the localized modes of the corresponding disordered photonic crystal waveguide. We demonstrate how the quality factors and effective mode volumes saturate at a specific cavity length and become bounded by the corresponding values of the Anderson modes appearing in the disordered waveguide. By means of the intensity fluctuation criterion, we observe Anderson localization for cavity lengths larger than around L31, and show that the field confinement in the disordered LN cavities is mainly determined by the local characteristics of the structural disorder as long as the confinement region is far enough from the cavity mirrors and the effective mode localization length is much smaller than the cavity length; under this regime, the disordered cavity system becomes insensitive to changes in the cavity boundaries and a good agreement with the intensity fluctuation criterion is found for localization. Surprisingly, we find that the Anderson localized modes do not appear as new disorder-induced resonances in the main spectral region of the LN cavity modes, and, moreover, the disordered DOS enhancement is largest for the disordered waveguide system with the same length. These results are fundamentally interesting for applications such as lasing and cavity-QED, and provide new insights into the role of the boundary condition on finite-size slow-light waveguides. They also point out the clear failure of using models based on the cavity boundaries/mirrors and a single slow-light Bloch mode to describe cavity systems with large N.

We present a fully three-dimensional Bloch mode expansion technique and a photon Green function formalism to compute the quality factors, mode volumes, and Purcell enhancement distributions of a disordered W1 photonic crystal slab waveguide in the slow-light Anderson-localization regime. By considering fabrication (intrinsic) and intentional (extrinsic) disorder we find that the Purcell enhancement statistics are well described by log-normal distributions without any fitting parameters. We also compare directly the effects of hole size fluctuations as well as fluctuations in the hole position. The functional dependence of the mean and standard deviation of the quality factor and Purcell enhancement distributions is found to decrease exponentially with the square root of the extrinsic disorder parameter. The strong coupling probability between a single quantum dot and an Anderson-localized mode is numerically computed and found to exponentially decrease with the squared extrinsic disorder parameter, where low disordered systems give rise to larger probabilities when state-of-the-art quantum dots are considered. The optimal spatial regions to position quantum dots in the W1 waveguide are also discussed. These theoretical results are fundamentally interesting for disordered photonics and connect to recent experimental works on photonic crystal slab waveguides in the slow-light regime. Our three-dimensional slab results also contradict some previous findings that use simpler two-dimensional models to understand these complex planar systems.

We study the effects of disorder on the coupling strength of coupled photonic crystal slab cavities by considering fully-3D electromagnetic calculations. Specifically, we investigate two coupled L3 cavities at 30 degrees and 60 degrees configurations, where the coupling strength J(or photon hopping) is extracted from the simulations in the presence of disorder. We found that the relative fluctuations of the photon hopping are more sensitive to disorder effects than the corresponding fluctuations in the eigen-frequencies of the coupled cavities. Furthermore, for the typical range of disorder in state-of-the-art devices, the J fluctuations are found to increase linearly as a function of the disorder amplitude. This allows one to set upper bounds to the amplitude of fabrication imperfections, for which the coupling predicted by design can still be expected, on average, in a fabricated device.

In this paper we propose, for the first time, all-optical Majority and Feynman gates in two-dimensional silicon photonic crystals. Photonic crystals are optical semiconductor nanodevices, formed by a periodicity in one, two or three dimensions in the refractive index of a macroscopic media. These devices can operate with low power consumption, high speed and low dissipation of energy to heat. A photonic crystal waveguide is a perfect platform to accomplish the design of all-optical devices. The functionality of logic gates proposed here is achieved due to the light beam interference effect. For the Majority gate, the simulation results show that the transmission to define logic 0 is less than 35% and logic 1 greater than 85%. In addition, for the Feynman gate the transmission to define logic 0 and logic 1 are ≤10% and ≥ 40%, respectively. In order to perform the simulations we applied the FDTD method in the MEEP software package. The Majority and Feynman logic devices presented here can be potential candidates for the realization of low power photonic computational circuits.

We study the mutual interaction between two identical quantum dots coupled to the normal modes of two-site photonic crystal molecules in a planar waveguide geometry, i.e. photonic crystal dimers. We find that the radiative coupling between the two quantum emitters is maximized when they are in resonance with either the bonding or the antibonding modes of the coupled cavity system. Moreover, we find that such effective interdot coupling is sizable, in the meV range, and almost independent from the cavities distance, as long as a normal mode splitting exceeding the radiative linewidth can be established (strong cavity-cavity coupling condition). In realistic and high quality factor photonic crystal cavity devices, such distance can largely exceed the emission wavelength, which is promising for long distance entanglement generation between two qubits in an integrated nanophotonic platform. We show that these results are robust against position disorder of the two quantum emitters within their respective cavities., 10 pages, 6 figures

We study the reflectivity spectra of photonic crystal slab cavities using an extension of the scattering matrix method that allows treating finite sizes of the spot of the excitation beam. The details of the implementation of the method are presented and then we show that Fano resonances arise as a consequence of the electromagnetic interference between the discrete contribution of the fundamental cavity mode and the continuum contribution of the light scattered by the photonic crystal pattern. We control the asymmetry lineshape of the Fano resonance through the polarization of the incident field, which determines the relative phase between the two electromagnetic contributions to the interference. We analyse the electric field profile inside and outside of the crystal to help in the understanding of the dependence on polarization of the reflectivity lineshape. We also study with our implementation the dependence of the Fano resonances on the size of the incident radiation spot.

We report the results of polarization resolved reflectivity experiments in GaAs air‐bridge photonic crystals with L3 cavities. We show that the fundamental L3 cavity mode changes, in a controlled way, from a Lorentzian symmetrical lineshape to an asymmetrical form when the linear polarization of the incident light is rotated in the plane of the crystal. The different lineshapes are well fitted by the Fano asymmetric equation, implying that a Fano resonance is present in the reflectivity. We use the scattering matrix method to model the Fano interference between a localized discrete state (the cavity fundamental mode) and a background of continuum states (the light reflected from the crystal slab in the vicinity of the cavity) with very good agreement with the experimental data.

We study the change in coupling between two GaAs lambda‐microcavities embedded in a one‐dimensional photonic crystal composed of GaAs‐AlGaAs Bragg mirrors when the refractive index of the region between the cavities is externally modulated in several diferent ways. We show that the coupling of the cavities can be significantly changed when the refractive index in the intercavity region is modulated with a Gaussian profile, such as could be obtained by illuminating the intercavity region with a strong laser pulse. This opens the way for the implementation of a full optical switch device. For this system we find that it is possible to delocalize an excited cavity mode whilst the fundamental mode remains confined.

We investigate the reflectivity spectra of photonic crystal cavities using the polarization of the incoming exciting light to tune the Fano interference between the radiation reflected by the polarized cavity mode and the light scattered by the photonic crystal pattern. The reflectivity is controlled by the polarization of the incident radiation, with the change from symmetrical to asymmetrical lineshapes well described by the Fano resonance formula. We use the scattering matrix formalism to obtain the reflectivity lineshapes by relating the electromagnetic field incident on the cavity to the radiation that is reflected in qualitative good agreement with the experimental results.

En este trabajo se estudian los modos electromagnéticos en cristales fotónicos uno-dimensionales y dos-dimensionales (1D y 2D) a través del método de diferencias finitas en el dominio de las frecuencias FDFD. Los diagramas de bandas son calculados para cristales 1D regulares y con defecto, al igual que sus perfiles de intensidad electromagnética. De igual manera se calculan los diagramas de bandas y perfiles de intensidad para cristales 2D regulares en redes hexagonal y cuadrada. Nuestros cálculos son comparados con los obtenidos en el software MPB proporcionado por el MIT y basado en el método de expansión de ondas planas.