Photonic
Crystals
in Integrated Optics: the Bumpy Way towards Optical Circuits
A lot of hype has been dedicated to photonic crystals (PhCs) in the past five years. Can the PhC community keep up with what it promised in the past?
Two-dimensional PhCs at near-infrared wavelengths are promising candidates for applications in the field of integrated optics. The ultimate goal would be an ‘‘all PhC’’ monolithically integrated optical circuit, consisting of a large number of building blocks. Several building blocks have been analyzed both experimentally and numerically. The results for straight waveguides, directional couplers and coupled cavity waveguides will be discussed in detail. The optical measurement results on the GaAs-based samples have been obtained using the ‘‘internal light source technique’’. The measurements have been successfully compared to the modeling results obtained by the plane wave expansion (PWE) and the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method.
