Abstract
Coupled microresonators are expected to play a key role in slow-light engineering and various types of light-matter interaction enhancement, especially if they are based on small and high-Q cavities. Although rapid progress has been made on microresonator performance, large-scale arrays of coupled resonators based on high-Q wavelength-sized cavities have not yet been realized. Here, we show large-scale (N > 100) ultrahigh-Q coupled nanocavity arrays based on photonic crystals. This is the first demonstration of large-scale coupled resonator arrays based on wavelength-sized cavities, in which tight-binding sinusoidal dispersion is seen. We confirm that an ultrahigh value of Q (∼1 × 106) is maintained, even when N is large, and the resonators exhibit very low loss characteristics with regard to light propagation. The ultrahigh value of Q and small size has enabled us to achieve ultraslow light pulse propagation with a group velocity well below 0.01c and a long group delay.
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Acknowledgements
We thank H. Taniyama, M. Kato and A. Shinya for helpful discussions and support.
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M.N. wrote the manuscript, analysed the data and led the project. E.K. fabricated the samples, performed the experiments and analysed the data. T.T performed the time-resolved measurements.
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Notomi, M., Kuramochi, E. & Tanabe, T. Large-scale arrays of ultrahigh-Q coupled nanocavities. Nature Photon 2, 741–747 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2008.226
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2008.226
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