Near-field visualization of light confinement in a photonic crystal microresonator

Opt Lett. 2004 Jan 15;29(2):174-6. doi: 10.1364/ol.29.000174.

Abstract

By using scanning near-field optical microscopy, we directly map the subwavelength confinement of light around a point defect in a two-dimensional photonic crystal microresonator. Comparison of our results with the outcome of three-dimensional finite-difference time domain calculations allows us to identify small imperfections in the structure that result in the spatial modification of the intensity distribution.