Design of microcavities in diamond-based photonic crystals

Microcavities in diamond-based photonic crystals are being considered as an attractive architecture to manipulate and control atom-photon coupling. Here we consider a photonic crystal structure consisting of a triangular lattice of air holes etched into a thin free-standing membrane of diamond. By introducing point defects into the periodic structure, light can be localized in three dimensions within a volume smaller than one cubic wavelength. Our work is focused on the "Zero missing hole waveguide-section cavity (M0)" cavity, where the defect is created by shifting two neighboring holes outwards. The field distribution as well as the resonant frequency and the Q-factor of the cavity mode are calculated by FDTD simulations.