Dispersion engineering of slow light photonic crystal waveguides using microfluidic infiltration

We present a technique based on the selective liquid infiltration of photonic crystal (PhC) waveguides to produce very small dispersion slow light over a substantial bandwidth. We numerically demonstrate that this approach allows one to control the group velocity (from c/20 to c/110) from a single PhC waveguide design, simply by choosing the index of the liquid to infiltrate. In addition, we show that this method is tolerant to deviations in the PhC parameters such as the hole size, which relaxes the constraint on the PhC fabrication accuracy as compared to previous structural-based methods for slow light dispersion engineering. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America