Philippe Velha
Research assistant, university of glasgow
SPLASH addresses the issues of optical switches, tunable delay lines and optical buffering that is essential for realising the vision of all optical data processing. The consortium will realise these functions by exploring optical slow light structures based on coupled ring resonators and photonic crystal waveguides.
The core demonstrators are:
Broadband slowlight PCwg (Photonic Crystal Waveguides) that combine slowdown factors with broadband and efficient optical coupling.
Tunable coupler by exploiting slow light phenomena in photonic crystals, the coupler will be very compact (10’s of µm), yet require only refractive index changes of order for complete switching. Tuning will be thermo-optic, electro-optic and all optical.
Tunable delay line. Tunable ring resonators will be used to continuously control the delay properties of a system of coupled resonators
Switchtable optical storage. By tuning/detuning the elements of coupled resonator delay line, optical information will be stored.
Structures will be realised in SOI technology to achieve the maximum compactness and maximum number of bits stored/unit area.
54 contacts2004 - 2008I endeavored to study theoretically and experimentally optical resonators on SOI that exhibit large Q/V ratio and permit to validate the physical mechanism of the modal adaptation. I also tried to understand the mechanisms of the injection into slow modes, which exhibit low group velocities. These two aspects of the light confinement aim to enhance the light-matter interaction for practical applications. I have developed skills in three kind of studies and practical work :
Design : RCWA calculation, plane wave method
Fabrication : e-beam lithography, ICP etching
Characterization : waveguided spectroscopy, near field spectroscopy