Enhanced localization of light in slow wave slot photonic crystal waveguides

A flexible design of slot photonic crystal waveguide with a wide comb is investigated. Introduction of a carefully designed comb within the photonic crystal waveguide allows an accurate dispersion engineering in order to achieve slow light and increase the optical confinement within the comb. The strong light confinement results in an extremely small nonlinear effective area around 0.015 mu m(2). We report experimental realization of a comb photonic crystal waveguide with measured group indices higher than 100 in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer configuration and extract losses limited to 3.7 dB for a 100 mu m device at n(g) = 37. (c) 2012 Optical Society of America