This talk outlines the DARPA Slow Light program. Fundamental application classes are mentioned, and the scientific motivation for each developed to indicate overall goals, prospects for technology development, and insertion into specific devices.
Unluckily, light is inherently difficult to control, not to mention how hard it is to store it.This is not only due to its speed, but also to the very nature of its basic unit, the photon, being massless and having no electric charge.A number of ingenious and diverse schemes to diminish the speed of light in a controllable fashion has been proposed, giving rise to the intriguing field of slow light.All slow light schemes are based in the same basic principle, in www.intechopen.comAdvanced Photonic Sciences 54 spite of their interdisciplinary nature: the existence of a single sharp resonance or multiple resonances (Khurgin & Tucker, 2009).As it will be justified, photonic crystal devices are, to our understanding, the most promising approach for the development of practical photonic devices based on slow light.This chapter begins by reviewing the motivation and principles of slow light, followed by a description and assessment of the different techniques to diminish the speed of light and the applications of this phenomenon.In a subsequent section the particularly promising approach of slow-light photonic crystal arrangements will be addressed.In that section, together with the fundamentals of photonic band gap materials, their simulation methods and fabrication techniques, simulations results and analysis on our designs of slow-light photonic crystal arrangements will be presented.The chapter will be concluded with an assessment of photonic band gap engineered materials as a technology for developing slowlight based devices for telecommunications and microwave photonics applications.