Molding photons in dielectric waveguides and crystals

Photonic waveguides and crystals are widely used to localize light and enhance light-matter interactions. They are also key components in integrated photonic circuits for a variety of applications. In this talk, we show how to engineer dielectric nanostructure to achieve low-loss waveguiding and ultra-high quality factor cavities in various material systems. With tools enabled by YINQE, we have developed processes that produce photonic crystal nanocavities with optical quality factor exceeding 1,000,000. We demonstrate that full exploitation of these novel photonic nanostructures will lead to efficient photon generation, manipulation and detection on a chip platform, which facilitates our on-going efforts in enhancing photon-mechanics, photon-spin and photon-photon interactions.