Theory and experiments of disorder-induced resonance shifts and mode edge broadening in deliberately disordered photonic crystal waveguides

Abstract: We study both theoretically and experimentally the effects of introducing deliberate disorder in a slow-light photonic crystal waveguide on the photon density of states. We first introduce a theoretical model that includes both deliberate disorder through statistically moving the hole centres in the photonic crystal lattice and intrinsic disorder caused by manufacturing imperfections. We demonstrate a disorder-induced mean blueshift and an overall broadening of the photonic density of states for various amounts of deliberate disorder. By comparing with measurements from a GaAs photonic crystal waveguide, we find good qualitative agreement between theory and experiment which highlights the importance of carefully including local field effects for modelling high-index contrast perturbations. Our work also demonstrates the importance of using asymmetric dielectric polarizabilities for modelling positive and negative dielectric perturbations when modelling a perturbed dielectric interface in photonic crystal platforms.