Nanobeam Cavities for Reconfigurable Photonics

We investigate the design, fabrication, and experimental characterization of high quality factor photonic crystal nanobeam cavities, with theoretical quality factors of 1.4 x 10 7 in silicon, operating at 1550 nm. By detecting the cross-polarized resonantly scattered light from a normally incident laser beam, we measure a quality factor of nearly 7.5 x 10 5. We show on-chip integration of the cavities using waveguides and an inverse taper geometry based mode size converters, and also demonstrate tuning of the optical resonance using thermo-optic effect.