Highly selective and compact tunable MOEMS photonic crystal Fabry-Perot filter

The authors report a compact and highly selective tunable filter using a Fabry-Perot resonator combining a bottom micromachined 3-pair-InP/air-gap Bragg reflector with a top photonic crystal slab mirror. It is based on the coupling between radiated vertical cavity modes and waveguided modes of the photonic crystal. The full-width at half maximum (FWHM) of the resonance, as measured by microreflectivity experiments, is close to 1.5nm (around 1.55 mu m). The presence of the photonic crystal slab mirror results in a very compact resonator, with a limited number of layers. The demonstrator was tuned over a 20nm range for a 4V tuning voltage, the FWHM being kept below 2.5nm. Bending of membranes is a critical issue, and better results (FWHM congruent to 0.5nm) should be obtained on the same structure if this technological point is fixed. (c) 2006 Optical Society of America.