Restoring mode degeneracy in H1 photonic crystal cavities by uniaxial strain tuning

Abstract

We demonstrate a uniaxial strain technique to tune the mode wavelengths of planar photonic crystal cavities. With experiments and numerical simulations, we show that it is possible to use an externally applied strain to control the splitting of the modes of the H1 cavity with high precision. By using this technique, we restore degeneracy to the fundamental modes of an H1 cavity which are initially split by ∼0.5 nm, thus demonstrating unpolarized emission at ∼950 nm with a quality factor of ∼3300.