Slow light with large group index – bandwidth product in lattice-shifted photonic crystal waveguides

Abstract

This study presents a systematic optimization procedure to generate slow light with large group index, wideband, and low dispersion in an lattice-shifted photonic crystal waveguide. The waveguide is based on triangular lattice photonic crystal imposed by selectively altering the locations of the holes adjacent to the line defect. Under a constant group index criterion of ± 10% variation, when group indices are nearly constants of 24, 33, 46, 57, and 66, their corresponding bandwidths of flat band reach 24.2, 17.6, 12.8, 10.1 and 8.6 nm around 1550 nm, respectively. A nearly constant large group index – bandwidth product (GBP) of 0.37 is achieved for all cases. Low dispersion slow light propagation is confirmed by studying the relative temporal pulse-width spreading with the 2-D finite-difference time-domain method.