Planar photonic crystal devices allow to integrate complex optical functions in small-area photonic devices. For design and optimization of such structures simulations are very helpful.

Fig. 1: Geometry of a photonic crystal W1 waveguide.

Figure 1 shows the geometry of a typical building block of such devices, a W1 photonic crystal waveguide. It consists of a slab waveguide perforated by a periodic pattern of air holes where one row of holes is missing and forms a waveguide for light frequencies within the bandgap of the periodic structure. Figure 2 shows a detail of the geometry and part of the triangular discretization. A guided mode of the waveguide entering the computational domain on the left side, at chosen wavelength, is applied as source field. The time-harmonic near field solution is then computed with JCMsuite's light scattering module JCMharmony. From the nearfield, experimental observables like transmission and reflection are computed using automatic postprocesses.

Fig. 3: Real part of the electric field distribution in a pseudocolor representation (visualization: JCMview).

Figure 3 shows the real part of the z-polarized electric field, Figure 4 shows the corresponding phase distribution. Computation time for the displayed example is below 10 seconds (standard PC, single-thread, using third order finite elements and adaptive grid refinement). The transmission at the given specific wavelength is computed to a relative precision of about 0.1%.

Fig. 4: Phase distribution of the electric field in a pseudocolor representation (visualization: JCMview).

Please note that the waveguides entering and leaving the computational domain are treated rigorously within JCMsuite. Therefore they do not lead to any artificial reflections at the boundaries.