A systematic analysis of hole size, hole-type and rows shifting on slow light characteristics of photonic crystal waveguides with ring-shaped holes

A photonic crystal waveguide embedded in silica is proposed and the effects of number of defect rows adjacent to the line-defect, number of rows shifted in transverse direction to the light propagation and the types of holes in these rows on slow light properties are investigated without changing the line-width by plane-wave expansion method. We observe that the structure with one row of ring-shaped holes exhibits better slow light properties than the structure with two and three innermost rows of ring-shaped holes when outer and inner radius of the holes are considered as free parameters. Shifting the second innermost rows of holes is found to be preferable than shifting the second innermost rows of rings. Besides, shifting the second and third innermost rows together does not make considerable enhancement on the slow light properties as shifting only the second innermost rows, no matter the shifting holes are ring-shaped holes or only holes.