In this talk, I will describe how photonic crystals (PCs) exhibit exotic characteristics concerning dispersion and confinement, and show dynamic all-optical control of PC cavity-waveguide system lead to rich and interesting novel optical phenomena and unprecedented device operation.

In the first part of this talk, I will describe exotic dispersion in photonic crystals (PCs), such as negative refraction in bulk PCs (spatial dispersion), slow-light modes in PC waveguide (frequency dispersion), and also describe ultra-strong light confinement realized in PCs, in which I show our recent result about ultra-small PC nanocavities with Q of one million.

The second part of this talk will be about dynamic control of these properties, especially for PC cavity-waveguide systems. I will show our experimental results about all-optical bistable switching operation in Si PC nanocavities, and theoretical design of various logic function circuits (such as flip-flop) based on the PC cavity-waveguide systems. Finally, I will describe dynamic control of cavity-waveguide systems leads to various interesting and novel optical phenomena, such as adiabatic wavelength conversion, all-optical photon DRAM, and also extremely efficient opto-mechanical interaction. All of those are based on long photon lifetime in small structures, namely ultrasmall high-Q cavities and slow-light waveguides realized in PCs.

Masaya Notomi received his B.E., M.E. and Dr. Eng. degrees in applied physics from University of Tokyo, Japan in 1986, 1988, and 1997, respectively. In 1988, he joined Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, NTT Optoelectronics Laboratories, Japan. Since then, his research interest has been to control the optical properties of materials and devices by using artificial nanostructures, and engaged in research on semiconductor quantum wires/dots and photonic crystal structures. He is currently a Distinguished Technical Member of NTT Basic Research Laboratories, Japan and a group leader of photonic nanostructure research group. From 1996-1997, he was with Linkoping University, Sweden as a visiting researcher. >From 2002, he is also a guest associate professor of Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. Dr. Notomi is a member of IEEE LEOS, the Japan Society of Applied Physics, and the American Physical Society.