Photonic crystal structures for efficient localization or extraction of light

Abstract

Three-dimensional (3D) photonic crystals offer the opportunity of light manipulation in all directions in space, but they are very difficult to fabricate. On the other hand, planar photonic crystals are much simpler to make, but they exhibit only a quasi-3D confinement, resulting from the combined action of 2D photonic crystal and internal reflection. The imperfect confinement in the third dimension produces some unwanted out-of-plane loss, which is usually a limiting factor in performance of these structures. This thesis proposes how to fully take advantage of the relatively simple fabrication of planar photonic crystals, by addressing a problem of loss-reduction. One of the greatest challenges in photonics is a construction of optical microcavities with small mode volumes and large quality factors, for efficient localization of light. Beside standard applications of these structures (such as lasers or filters), they can potentially be used for cavity QED experiments, or as building blocks for quantum networks. This work also presents the design and fabrication of optical microcavities based on planar photonic crystals, with mode volumes of the order of one half of cubic wavelength of light (measured in material) and with Q factors predicted to be even larger than 10000. In addition to photonic crystals fabricated in semiconductors, we also address interesting properties of metallic photonic crystals and present our theoretical and experimental work on using them to improve the output of light emissive devices. Feature sizes of structures presented here are below those achievable by photolithography. Therefore, a high resolution lithography is necessary for their fabrication. The presently used e-beam writing techniques suffer from limitations in speed and wafer throughput, and they represent a huge obstacle to commercialization of photonic crystals. Our preliminary work on electron beam projection lithography, the technique that could provide us with the speed of photolithography and the resolution of e-beam writing, is also discussed in this thesis.