Large area photonic crystal cavities: a local density approach

Abstract

Slowly chirped two-dimensional photonic crystal cavities are promising devices for creating photonic Bose-Einstein condensates. Before experimentally achieving such a condensate, one first has to thoroughly investigate the electromagnetic eigenmodes in such crystals. However, slowly chirped photonic crystals leading to cavities for light will easily have sizes in the order of tens of micrometers. Therefore simulating the behaviour of light in these crystals is very time consuming. In this thesis we demonstrate a novel and intuitive approach to obtain the envelopes of the electromagnetic modes in these crystals. An enormous advantage of this approach is that it can calculate the energies and the envelopes of these eigenmodes to a high accuracy in a few seconds.