Wideband slow light and dispersion control in oblique lattice photonic crystal waveguides

We find that the angle between elementary lattice vectors obviously affects the bandwidth and dispersion of slow light in photonic crystal line-defect waveguides. When the fluctuation of group index is strictly limited in a +/- 1% range, the oblique lattice structures with the angle between elementary lattice vectors slightly larger than 60 degrees have broader available bandwidth of flat band slow light than triangular lattice structures. For example, for the angle 66 degrees, there are increases of the available bandwidth from 20% to 68% for several different structures. For the same angle and a +/- 10% variation in group velocity, when group indices are nearly constants of 30, 48.5, 80 and 130, their corresponding bandwidths of flat band reach 20 nm, 11.8 nm, 7.3 nm and 3.9 nm around 1550 nm, respectively. The increasing of bandwidth is related to the shift of the anticrossing point towards smaller wave numbers. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America