Experimental demonstration of evanescent coupling from optical fibre tapers to photonic crystal waveguides

Experimental results demonstrating nearly complete mode-selective evanescent coupling to a photonic crystal waveguide from an optical fibre taper are presented. Codirectional coupling with 98% maximum power transfer to a photonic crystal waveguide of length 65 μm and with a coupling bandwidth of 20 nm is realised

Probing the dispersive and spatial properties of photonic crystal waveguides via highly efficient coupling from fiber tapers

The demonstration of an optical fiber based probe for efficiently exciting the waveguide modes of high-index contrast planar photonic crystal (PC) slabs is presented. Fiber taper waveguides formed from standard silica single-mode optical fibers are used to evanescently couple light into the guided modes of a patterned silicon membrane. A coupling efficiency of ~95% is obtained between the fiber taper and a PC waveguide mode suitably designed for integration with a previously studied ultrasmall mode volume high-Q PC resonant cavity [Srinivasan et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 83, 1915 (2003)]. The micron-scale lateral extent and dispersion of the fiber taper is used as a near-field spatial and spectral probe to study the profile and dispersion of PC waveguide modes

Feasibility of detecting single atoms using photonic bandgap cavities

We propose an atom-cavity chip that combines laser cooling and trapping of neutral atoms with magnetic microtraps and waveguides to deliver a cold atom to the mode of a fiber taper coupled photonic bandgap (PBG) cavity. The feasibility of this device for detecting single atoms is analyzed using both a semi-classical treatment and an unconditional master equation approach. Single-atom detection seems achievable in an initial experiment involving the non-deterministic delivery of weakly trapped atoms into the mode of the PBG cavity.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure