Experimental verification of numerically optimized photonic crystal injector, Y-splitter, and bend

We present the experimental measurement of a photonic crystal (PhC) device comprising an injector, Y-splitter, and 60° bend. The complete device consists of a 9-μm-long injector tapering down from 5 μm into a triangular-lattice-of-holes single-line defect waveguide with period a=430 nm and 36.2% air filling factor (corresponding to a radius over period (r/a) ratio of 0.30), an optimized Y-junction, 60° bend and output injectors, with a total device footprint of 30 μm. This is etched into a GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructure using chlorine/argon chemically assisted ion beam etching (CAIBE). An erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA)-based source and Fabry-Perot technique are used to characterize the device. The device displays a bandwidth of approximately 110 nm in the 1.55 μm window, and a transmission of 70% relative to the same length of 5-μm-wide waveguide. This is compared with three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain (3-D FDTD) results, which have a bandwidth and transmission of 120 nm and 75%, respectively. The highlight of this paper is the close agreement of the numerically optimized complete microcircuit with its experimental equivalent, and the significant improvement in bandwidth over previous work on Y-junctions.