Confinement of photons and control of their emission using surface addressable photonic crystal membrane

International audience; High index contrast periodic structures can be exploited to perform an arbitrarily adjustable spatio-temporal molding of light at the wavelength scale. This tight control of photons is obtained through a shaping of resonant modes and a suitable adjustment of their coupling with propagative modes. In this talk, surface addressable (or above the light line) Bloch modes in photonic crystal membranes (PCMs) will be investigated. The concepts governing the properties of these modes will be first presented. It will be demonstrated that simple models can be considered to understand their behavior and, more specifically, their ability to capture photons during the desired lifetime. Bloch modes with a very large band width or a very high Q factor can be easily designed this way. The wide application range of these PCMs will be illustrated by different devices. Low Q Bloch modes will be first used as efficient and broadband reflectors and exploited to realize compact and efficient vertical cavity lasers with unprecedented functionalities. In addition, it will be shown that this kind of mirrors can be bent in order to confine photons in the 3 directions even in low index materials, opening the way to a new class of emitters and sensors. Finally, the exploitation of high Q Bloch modes to design highly directional thermal emitters with wavelength selectivity will be presented.