Photonic crystals in slab waveguides: from physics to function for integrated optics

Summary form only given. This tutorial aims at providing the attendee with a vision of how 2D photonic crystals might find their place into applications in integrated optics and how they could provide a variety of functions, some existing, some more novel. 2D photonic crystals are more mature for shaping deterministic defects inside them than their 3D counterparts, and although their confinement properties are inferior, there are so many handles easily available that putting the 2D crystals to good use is now at hand, with numerous recent demonstrations, such as the photonic band gap laser, coupling from a waveguide to a single defect, low-loss coupling from a cavity to a waveguide, low-loss propagation in a straight waveguide etc.