2018/12/10 by Fengwen Wang, Rasmus Ellebæk Christiansen, Rasmus E. Christiansen +3 · 14 citations
Physics and Astronomy · Engineering · Materials Science · #Photonic Crystals and Applications #Photonic and Optical Devices #Optical Coatings and Gratings
paper · doi:10.1063/1.5064468
Small manufacturing-tolerant photonic crystal cavities are systematically designed using topology optimization to enhance the ratio between the quality factor and mode volume, Q/V. For relaxed manufacturing tolerance, a cavity with a bow-tie shape is obtained which confines light beyond the diffraction limit into a deep-subwavelength volume. Imposition of a small manufacturing tolerance still results in efficient designs, however, with diffraction-limited confinement. Inspired by numerical results, an elliptic ring grating cavity concept is extracted via geometric fitting. Numerical evaluations demonstrate that for small sizes, topology-optimized cavities enhance the Q/V-ratio by up to two orders of magnitude relative to standard L1 cavities and more than one order of magnitude relative to shape-optimized L1 cavities. An increase in cavity size can enhance the Q/V-ratio by an increase in the Q-factor without a significant increase in V. Comparison between optimized and reference cavities illustrates that significant reduction of V requires big topological changes in the cavity.