Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE
Potential of slowlight in photonic crystal
Toshihiko Baba, Daisuke Mori
Abstract
Light showing extremely slow propagation (known as "slow light") can produce various effects such as compression of optical signals, buffering, convolution integral calculation, beam forming, enhancement of optical absorption, gain, non-linearity, and so on. To generate such light, very large material and structural dispersions are used. Photonic crystal waveguides are good candidates for many device applications since they can easily generate slow light at room temperature. This paper discusses the potential of slow light devices while explaining some critical issues, such as the delay-band product and the dispersion compensation.