Coupled-resonator optical waveguide: a proposal and analysis

Abstract

We propose a new type of optical waveguide that consists of a sequence of coupled high- Q resonators. Unlike other types of optical waveguide, waveguiding in the coupled-resonator optical waveguide (CROW) is achieved through weak coupling between otherwise localized high- Q optical cavities. Employing a formalism similar to the tight-binding method in solid-state physics, we obtain the relations for the dispersion and the group velocity of the photonic band of the CROW's and find that they are solely characterized by coupling factor k 1 . We also demonstrate the possibility of highly efficient nonlinear optical frequency conversion and perfect transmission through bends in CROW's.