Dependence of extrinsic loss on group velocity in photonic crystal waveguides

We examine the effects of disorder on propagation loss as a function of group velocity for W1 photonic crystal (PhC) waveguides. Disorder is deliberately and controllably introduced into the photonic crystal by pseudo-randomly displacing the holes of the photonic lattice. This allows us to clearly distinguish two types of loss. Away from the band-edge and for moderately slow light ( group velocity c/20-c/30) loss scales sublinearly with group velocity, whereas near the band-edge, reflection loss increases dramatically due to the random and local shift of the band-edge. The optical analysis also shows that the random fabrication errors of our structures, made on a standard e-beam lithography system, are below 1 nm root mean square. (C) 2007 Optical Society of America.