Phys.org August 7, 2019
Existing photonic crystal cavities usually only confine one wavelength of light and their structures are highly customized to accommodate that one wavelength. To force the coexistence of the two laser beams using a photonic crystal cavity, an international team of researchers (USA -Stanford University, Italy) devised a structure that combines two different ways to confine light, one to hold onto the infrared light and another to hold the green, all still contained within one tiny crystal. After ironing out the details of their two-part structure, the researchers produced a list of four conditions, which should guide colleagues in building a photonic crystal cavity capable of holding two very different wavelengths of light. Their results could lead to unprecedented conversion efficiencies in both parametric down-conversion and second-harmonic generation in an extremely compact architecture…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
An illustration of the researchers’ design. The holes in this microscopic slab structure are arranged and resized in order to control and hold two wavelengths of light. The scale bar on this image is 2 nanometers, or two billionths of a meter. Credit: Momchil Minkov