Ultra slow light achievement in photonic crystals by merging coupled cavities with waveguides

We explore slow light behavior of a specially designed optical waveguide by carrying out structural dispersion using numerical techniques. The structure proposed is composed of square-lattice photonic crystal waveguide integrated with side-coupled cavities. We report three orders of magnitude reduction in group velocity at around upsilon(g) congruent to 0.0008c with strongly suppressed group velocity dispersion. The analysis is performed by using both plane-wave expansion and finite-difference time-domain methods. For the first time, we succeeded to show such a low group velocity in photonic structures. Slow light pulse propagation accompanied by light tunneling between each cavity is observed. These achievements show the feasibility of photonic devices to generate extremely large group index which in turn will eventually pave the way to new frontiers in nonlinear optics, optical buffers and low threshold lasers. (C)2010 Optical Society of America