Dispersionless tunneling of slow light in antisymmetric photonic crystal couplers

We suggest a novel and general approach to the design of photonic-crystal directional couplers operating in the slow-light regime. We predict, based on a general symmetry analysis, that robust tunneling of slow-light pulses is possible between antisymmetrically coupled photonic crystal waveguides. We demonstrate, through Bloch mode frequency-domain and finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations that, for all pulses with strongly reduced group velocities at the photonic band-gap edge, complete switching occurs at a fixed coupling length of just a few unit cells of the photonic crystal. (c) 2008 Optical Society of America.