We have demonstrated 1.55 μm wavelength lightwave propagation through a 120° sharply bent waveguide formed in a triangular-lattice two-dimensional photonic crystal (2D PC). Such propagation has not previously been experimentally confirmed. The photonic crystal was fabricated in a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer with the top silicon layer of the wafer used as a core layer. A 877-μm-long single-line-defect waveguide was formed in the PC with a sharp 120° bend near the middle of the waveguide. A tapered-hemispherical-end fiber was coupled to the input end of the waveguide for the light input, and the output from the other end of the waveguide was directly observed by scanning its near-field profile with another tapered-hemispherical-end fiber.

We have experimentally demonstrated the guiding of light at a 1.5 μm wavelength in straight and 90°-bent line-defect waveguides in two-dimensional square-lattice-of-rods photonic crystal slabs. The light was guided by being confined in a row of the rods that were thinner than the surrounding ones. A new structural design to greatly facilitate their fabrication process without degrading the guiding property was used. The propagation loss measured for a 1.8-mm-straight waveguide was 4.8 dB/mm, which is small enough to allow us to proceed to integrated optical circuit application.

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An electromagnetic (EM) Bloch wave propagating in a photonic crystal (PC) is characterized by the immittance (impedance and admittance) of the wave. The immittance is used to investigate transmission and reflection at a surface or an interface of the PC. In particular, the general properties of immittance are useful for clarifying the wave propagation characteristics. We give a general proof that the immittance of EM Bloch waves on a plane in infinite one-and two-dimensional (2D) PCs is real when the plane is a reflection plane of the PC and the Bloch wavevector is perpendicular to the plane. We also show that the pure-real feature of immittance on a reflection plane for an infinite three-dimensional PC is good approximation based on the numerical calculations. The analytical proof indicates that the method used for immittance matching is extremely simplified since only the real part of the immittance function is needed for analysis without numerical verification. As an application of the proof, we describe a method based on immittance matching for qualitatively evaluating the reflection at the surface of a semi-infinite 2D PC, at the interface between a semiinfinite slab waveguide (WG) and a semi-infinite 2D PC line-defect WG, and at the interface between a semi-infinite channel WG and a semi-infinite 2D PC slab line-defect WG.

We fabricated a photonic crystal (PC) line-defect waveguide integrated with a microelectromechanical actuator and demonstrated the optical switching operation. The device consisted of a PC line-defect waveguide fabricated in a silicon-on-insulator substrate and a polycrystalline-Si dielectric plate located above the PC waveguide. An applied voltage moved the dielectric plate towards the PC surface due to the electrostatic force. This motion increased out-of-plane scattering of the guided light through the evanescent interaction with the dielectric plate, and modulated the transmittance of the PC waveguide. With only a 5μm interaction length, an extinction ratio of ∼10dB was obtained at a wavelength of 1568nm under an applied voltage of 60V. The response time of the switching operation was approximately 1ms.