Analyzing honeycomb photonic crystal waveguides by Dirichlet-to-Neumann maps

Abstract

As an analog to graphene, honeycomb photonic crystals (PhCs) have attracted a great deal of interest in recent years. The additional degrees of freedom in a honeycomb PhC are useful in designing and optimizing waveguides, can be used to control the symmetry of the system and to realize novel optical devices. In this paper, we present an efficient numerical method for analyzing two-dimensional honeycomb PhC waveguides. Our method is based on a special supercell that covers one period of the honeycomb PhC waveguide and the so-called Dirichlet-to-Neumann map of the supercell. The method gives rise to a linear eigenvalue value problem with relatively small matrices, and it is validated by comparing with previous works. As an application of the method, we calculate edge modes for a few different PhCs. For a honeycomb PhC with dielectric rods in air, we found an edge mode at the zigzag edge, without using special modified rods at the edge. For a honeycomb PhC with air holes, we found a new edge mode when the PhC is bounded by a perfectly electric conductor.