Inkjet printed nanocavities on a photonic crystal template

Abstract

The possibility to create high Q cavities by the deposition of a thin film of a low refractive index material on the surface of a photonic crystal (PhC) template [1] has been rarely explored. The few experimental demonstrations to date have involved material-specific e-beam or UV exposure techniques. In this work we use a commercially available inkjet printer with fL droplet delivery to create nanocavities on-demand with structurally tunable resonance on the surface of a PhC template. We show that this fabrication method is particularly suited to the creation of 1 μm-wide strips with sub-100 nm film thicknesses on the PhC surface, resulting in high Q cavity modes with mode volume approaching a cubic wavelength. A new paradigm for a direct-written nanophotonics is thus established, allowing the efficient coupling of any solution-processable material [2] to optical modes by a simple, non-contaminating and local deposition method.