Design of a novel wideband single-mode waveguide in a photonic crystal slab structure

We propose a novel photonic crystal slab waveguide that provides a single-mode band with large bandwidth. The proposed waveguide is obtained by introducing a line defect in a triangular lattice of air holes in a dielectric slab. This line defect consists of holes which are not located in the original lattice points. The plane wave expansion (PWE) method is used to extract the band diagram of guiding modes and based on the results, photonic crystal holes in the defect row and its adjacent rows are modified to maximize the waveguide bandwidth. We show that using the proposed structure, a single-mode bandwidth of 17% can be achieved.