SLOW SCALE MAXWELL-BLOCH EQUATIONS FOR ACTIVE PHOTONIC CRYSTALS

Abstract

We present a theory to describe the transient and steady state behaviors of the active modes of a photonic crystal with active constituents (active photonic crystal). Using a couple mode model, we showed that the full vectorial Maxwell-Bloch equations describing the physics of light matter interaction in the active photonic crystal can be written as a system of integro-difierential equations. Using the method of moments and the mean value theorem, we showed that the system of integro-difierential equations can be transformed to a set of difierential equations in slow time and slow spatial scales. The slow time (spatial) scale refers to a duration (distance) that is much longer than the optical time period (lattice constant of the photonic crystal). In the steady state, the slow scale equations reduce to a nonlinear matrix eigenvalue problem, from which the nonlinear Bloch modes can be obtained by an iterative method. For cases, where the coupling between the modes are negligible, we describe the transient behavior as an one-dimensional problem in the spatial coordinate, and the steady behaviors are expressed using simple analytical expressions.