Out-of-plane scattering in 1-D photonic crystal slabs

Abstract

We present a detailed study of out-of-plane scattering losses in a 1D approximation of 2D photonic crystal slabs. In 2D photonic crystals with a waveguide structure in the third dimension, the periodic structure (in a lot of applications a 2D arrangement of holes etched through the core and cladding) will cause light to scatter out of the waveguide plane. We studied the out-of-plane scattering losses of these holes using a 2D approximation of this 3D structure, with etched slots instead of holes. Our simulation techniques included mode expansion with PML and FDTD. We will present the influence of the refractive index contrast between core and cladding of the layered structure. We show that the losses increase with higher index contrast between core and cladding, but that with very high index contrasts and under the right circumstances light can be coupled into lossless Bloch modes.