While the promise of implementing slow light into integrated photonic circuitry offers all-optical processing and nextgeneration functionality such as scalable quantum information processing, serious problems associated with both the intrinsic and extrinsic physics of slow light threaten to compromise real-world implementations. In this work, we offer a practical implementation of slow light that is not affected by these issues. When slow light is actualized below certain length scales, it can used to enhance the functionality of already optimized photonic architectures and enable novel capabilities. One such important capability is to highly couple and correlate out-of-plane phenomena, such as optical trapping or single-photon extraction, with in-plane optical processing, such as interferometry and optical transmission in a compact area. We first present the theoretical arguments for such an implementation and then present two applications where local slow light engineering enables important functionality: scalable quantum information circuitry and compact single-molecule cellular phenotyping.

Date Published: 8 March 2014
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 8989, Smart Photonic and Optoelectronic Integrated Circuits XVI, 89890J (8 March 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2041795

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8989:
Smart Photonic and Optoelectronic Integrated Circuits XVI
Louay A. Eldada; El-Hang Lee; Sailing He, Editor(s)