Optical demultiplexing via rainbow trapping in graded-index photonic crystal waveguides

Multiwavelength nanophotonic devices are essential components in photonic integrated circuits for on-chip all-optical signal processing applications with enhanced data-storage capacity and increased bandwidth. Wavelength demultiplexing is a widely used photonic processing function, required for photonic signal processing on compact silicon chip designs. In this paper, we study optical rainbow trapping in a line defect photonic waveguide, and propose to use that effect for demultiplexing the light at visible spectrum. A defect waveguide is created in graded-index photonic crystal (GRIN PC) structure (the structure is composed of Si- PC cylinders having gradually varying radii along one dimension) as main channel, which allows the rainbow-trapping along the waveguiding channel. Vertical (side) channels are introduced to the system for efficient wavelength demultiplexing with low crosstalks and high coupling efficiencies thanks to the fact that incident light is localized at different positions along the main channel for certain operating visible wavelengths of {584.4nm, 561.0nm, 539.4nm}. The corresponding inter-channel cross-talks of {-10.9dB, -24.4dB, -30.6dB} is obtained at these incident wavelengths, which strengthens the idea of using such a GRIN PC structure for efficient wavelength demultiplexing applications. The studied multichannel demultiplexing device is relatively compact with a footprint of 4.2 mu m x 2.8 mu m, which could be fabricated via simple lithography processes on a single Si- wafer. As far as authors' knowledge, this is the first time in literature that GRIN PC waveguide is implemented for multichannel wavelength demultiplexing function. The proposed GRIN PC design could be implemented for color sensitive photo-detection, absorption enhancement and optical spectroscopy.