Photonic Origamis: from photon cages to topology

Rémi Briche, Hai-Son Nguyen, Aziz Benamrouche, Pierre Cremillieu, Philippe Regrény, Jean-Louis Leclercq, Xavier Letartre, Ségolène Callard, Alexandre Danescu

Université de Lyon, Ecole Centrale de Lyon, Institut des Nanotechnologies de Lyon, CNRS, UMR5270

Recently, nanofabrication techniques based on self-rolling of pre-stressed membranes have been developed in a thriving way and led to the creation of 3D nanostructures with complex geometries (tubes, coils, spheres). Meanwhile, the remarkable dispersion features of 2D photonic crystals allowed the development of photonic crystal based building blocks for devices involved in numerous applications. Combining the two approaches opens the path to the production of new families of versatile 3D photonic nanostructures based on stress-engineering fabrication and planar photonic crystals.

In this work, stress-engineering technique has first been used to create “photon cages” under the form of rolled-up 2D PCM mirror. These hollow resonant cavities are designed to confine efficiently the light in air or low index medium. After fabrication, near-field scanning optical measurement revealed the presence of cavity modes as predicted by numerical and analytical computations. It brought the proof of concept for photon cages and attested the quality of self-rolling fabrication technique.

We also used this technique to fabricate and characterize the analogue of SWNTs in the class of photonic crystals. The objective here is to investigate the optical properties of the rolled-up version of the honeycomb-lattice photonic crystal. In particular, the presence of non-trivial topological properties are expected depending on their chirality, as for their electronic counter-parts.

SEM pictures of rolled-up InP 2D photonic crystal membranes