The authors report low-power optical bistability under continuous wave pumping conditions in five-cell photonic crystal linear resonators containing InGaAsP quantum wells, by employing the fiber-coupling technique. The threshold bistable power is measured to be 35μW at the normalized detuning of −1.724. Owing to the high band-edge nonlinearities of quantum wells and the efficient fiber coupling, minimal instability is observed. In addition, all-optical switching is demonstrated with switching energy less than 75.4fJ.

We demonstrate the existence of surface waves in two-dimensional photonic crystal slab edges. In finite-sized air-terminated photonic crystal boundaries, the slab-edge mode turns into a lasing mode under pulsed optical pumping conditions. Analyses of the modal behaviors of the slab-edge modes by means of calculations based on the plane wave expansion method and the finite-difference time-domain method show that resonant frequencies and quality factors are strongly dependent on the termination parameter and the shape of the slab corner.