Highly efficient and compact photonic wire splitters on GaAs

Symmetrical optical power T-splitters were fabricated using miniaturized 90 degrees bends with a curvature radius of 2 mu m and a high transmittance of almost 99% per bend. A constant excess loss of only 1.4 dB was achieved at a photonic wire width of 450 nm over the wide wavelength range from 1.50 to 1.58 mu m. The dependence of the transmittance on the width of the photonic wires of the T-splitter was investigated experimentally and theoretically, and good agreement between experiments and three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain simulations was obtained. (C) 2007 American Institute of Physics.