Optical waveguides are the most fundamental building blocks of integrated optical circuits. They are extremely well understood, yet there is still room for surprises. Here, we introduce a novel 2D waveguide platform which affords a strong interaction of the evanescent tail of a guided optical wave with an external medium while only employing a very small geometrical footprint. The key feature of the platform is its ability to integrate the ultra-long path lengths by combining low propagation losses in a silicon slab with multiple reflections of the guided wave from photonic crystal (PhC) mirrors. With a reflectivity of 99.1% of our tailored PhC-mirrors, we achieve interaction paths of 25 cm within an area of less than 10 mm2. This corresponds to 0.17 dB/cm effective propagation which is much lower than the state-of-the-art loss of approximately 1 dB/cm of single mode silicon channel waveguides. In contrast to conventional waveguides, our 2D-approach leads to a decay of the guided wave power only inversely proportional to the optical path length. This entirely different characteristic is the major advantage of the 2D integrating cell waveguide platform over the conventional channel waveguide concepts that obey the Beer-Lambert law.

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We present a concept of a silicon slab based 2D integrating cell where photonic crystal (PhC) reflectors are used in order to confine light in a two-dimensional area to acquire a long propagation length. The evanescent field of the guided wave can be used for sensing applications. We use FDTD simulations to investigate the dependence of the reflectivity of photonic crystal mirrors with a hexagonal lattice. The reflectivity in Γ direction demonstrates reduced vertical losses compared to the Γ direction and can be further improved by adiabatically tapering the hole radii of the photonic crystal. A small hexagonal 2D integrating cell was studied with PhC boundaries oriented in Γ and Γ direction. It is shown that average reflectivities of 99% can be obtained in a rectangular 2D cell with optimized reflector design, limited only by residual vertical scattering losses at the PhC boundary. This reflectivity is already comparable to the best metallic reflectors.