Coupled-waves approach to the design and analysis of Bragg and photonic crystal annular resonators

We utilize a novel coupled-waves approach to design and analyze various types of annular resonators based on Bragg and photonic crystal reflectors. Optimal grating profiles and their corresponding modal fields are found for specific cases such as disk and defect mode (ring) resonators. An excellent match is found between our analytic approximations and exact results obtained by the transfer matrix formalism and finite-difference time-domain simulations.