Linear waveguides in photonic-crystal slabs, two-dimensionally periodic dielectric structures of finite height, are fundamentally different from waveguides in two-dimensional photonic crystals. The most important distinctions arise from the fact that photonic-crystal slab waveguides must be index-confined in the vertical direction ~while a band gap confines them horizontally!. We present a syst...

We study the dispersion and leakage properties for the recently reported low-loss photonic band-gap fiber by Smith et al. [Nature 424, 657 (2003)]. We find that surface modes have a significant impact on both the dispersion and leakage properties of the fundamental mode. Our dispersion results are in qualitative agreement with the dispersion profile reported recently by Ouzounov et al. [Science...

We fully characterize the stationary spatial-gap soliton through the measurement of the phase function of its nearly periodic transverse intensity distribution. The spatial-gap soliton is generated in one-dimensional photonic crystal consisting of a corrugated semiconductor planar optical waveguide. The measured phase function allows us to determine the detuning parameter that provides the posi...

Photonic crystals are periodically structured electromagnetic media, generally possessing photonic band gaps: ranges of frequency in which light cannot propagate through the structure. This periodicity, whose lengthscale is proportional to the wavelength of light in the band gap, is the electromagnetic analogue of a crystalline atomic lattice, where the latter acts on the electron wavefunction ...