Design of thin-film photonic crystal waveguides

Summary form only given. In integrated optics, waveguides which have highly controllable dispersion while being leak-free would be very useful indeed when making optical interconnections and regions above or below the film. We present a rigorous method for investigating these modes, which are not merely strongly guided; they are true guided modes. We have developed an accurate and generally applicable method for calculating the guided modes of photonic crystal films, and since the answers that we obtain are always explicitly decomposed into their component Bloch modes, we can always find out exactly what is happening inside the film in terms ofits elementary excitations.