High-Q photonic crystal cavities in all-semiconductor photonic-crystal heterostructures

Photonic crystal cavities enable the realization of high Q-factor and low mode-volume resonators, with typical architectures consisting of a thin suspended periodically-patterned layer to maximize confinement of light by strong index guiding. We investigate a heterostructure-based approach comprising a high refractive index core and lower refractive index cladding layers. Whilst confinement typically decreases with decreasing index contrast between the core and cladding layers, we show that, counter-intuitively, due to the confinement provided by the photonic band structure in the cladding layers, it becomes possible to achieve Q-factors > 104 with only a small refractive index contrast. This opens up new opportunities for implementing high Q-factor cavities in conventional semiconductor heterostructures, with direct applications to the design of electrically-pumped nano-cavity lasers using conventional fabrication approaches.