Large-bandwidth planar photonic crystal waveguides

A general design principle is presented for making finite-height photonic crystal waveguides that support leakage-free guidance of light over large frequency intervals. The large bandwidth waveguides are designed by introducing line defects in photonic crystal slabs, where the material in the line defect has appropriate dispersion properties relative to the photonic crystal slab material surrounding the line defect. A three-dimensional theoretical analysis is given for large-bandwidth waveguide designs based on a silicon-air photonic crystal slab suspended in air. In one example, the leakage-free single-mode guidance is found for a large frequency interval covering 60% of the photonic band-gap.