Design of Nano-Opto-Mechanical Reconfigurable Photonic Integrated Circuit

We designed a nano-opto-mechanical reconfigurable photonic integrated circuit (PIC) platform on a two-dimensional (2-D) photonic crystal (PC) slab. A 2-D array of mechanical plugs was initially placed above the PC. Each plug was designed to align with each air hole of the PC and assumed to be able to insert into and retrieve from the air hole, serving as an effective refractive index modulator for an individual photonic unit of the PC. By selectively inserting different plugs into their corresponding air holes, it was possible to realize various photonic circuits in the PC. We demonstrated this by forming three basic photonic building blocks in the PC using this approach, including a point-defect resonant cavity, a line-defect straight waveguide, and a 60-degree waveguide bend. Specifically, we designed the plugs and PC for the platform and investigated the influences of their structural parameters on photonic band diagrams and analyzed important optical properties of the three configured photonic building blocks using three-dimensional (3-D) plane-wave (PWM) and finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) methods. Also, we studied the influences of possible fabrication, alignment, and mechanical actuation errors on the optical properties of each photonic circuit. This work can benefit the efforts toward realizing a nano-opto-mechanical reconfigurable photonic integrated circuit (PIC) platform.