Improved design and experimental demonstration of ultrahigh-Q C6-symmetric H1 hexapole photonic crystal nanocavities

Abstract

An H1 photonic crystal nanocavity (PCN) is based on a single point defect and has eigenmodes with a variety of symmetric features. Thus, it is a promising building block for photonic tight-binding lattice systems that can be used in studies on condensed matter, non-Hermitian and topological physics. However, improving its radiative quality (Q) factor has been considered challenging. Here, we report the design of a hexapole mode of an H1 PCN with a Q factor exceeding 108. We achieved such extremely high-Q conditions by varying only four structural modulation parameters thanks to the C6 symmetry of the mode, despite the need of more complicated optimizations for many other PCNs. Our fabricated silicon H1 PCNs exhibited a systematic change in their resonant wavelengths depending on the spatial shift of the air holes in units of 1 nm. Out of 26 such samples, we found eight PCNs with loaded Q factors over one million. The best sample was of a measured Q factor of 1.2 × 106, and its intrinsic Q factor was estimated to be 1.5 × 106. We examined the difference between the theoretical and experimental performances by conducting a simulation of systems with input and output waveguides and with randomly distributed radii of air holes. Automated optimization using the same design parameters further increased the theoretical Q factor by up to 4.5 × 108, which is two orders of magnitude higher than in the previous studies. We clarify that this striking improvement of the Q factor was enabled by the gradual variation in effective optical confinement potential, which was missing in our former design. Our work elevates the performance of the H1 PCN to the ultrahigh-Q level and paves the way for its large-scale arrays with unconventional functionalities.