LEOS Distinguished Lecture will be presented on July 2, 2007.

Title: Photonic Crystal Devices

John O'Brien, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

In this presentation I will discuss photonic crystal lasers with particular emphasis on devices capable of room temperature CW operation, devices capable of achieving approximately 100 mW of output power under pulsed operation, and devices with quantum dot active regions. The CW lasers have 3 dB bandwidths of just under 10 GHz with approximately 30 dB of side mode suppression. The photonic crystal lasers with quantum dot active regions have absorbed powers at threshold of under 10 microwatts. I will also discuss efforts to model the electromagnetic properties of these devices in the near and far field using both finite-difference time-domain and finite element methods and compare these predictions to the experimental data.The presentation will also address device issues associated with passive photonic crystal components such as optical loss, waveguide dispersion, and the design of waveguide junctions. Demonstrations of Mach-Zehnder interferometers and directional couplers will be presented and again results from experiments will be compared to numerical predictions.