Numerical investigation of high-contrast ultrafast all-optical switching in low-refractive-index polymeric photonic crystal nanobeam microcavities

With the development of micro- or nano-fabrication technologies, great interest has been aroused in exploiting photonic crystal nanobeam structures. In this article the design of high-quality-factor (Q) polymeric photonic crystal nanobeam microcavities suitable for realizing ultrafast all-optical switching is presented based on the three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain method. Adopting the pump-probe technique, the ultrafast dynamic response of the all-optical switching in a nanobeam microcavity with a quality factor of 1000 and modal volume of 1.22 (λ/n)3 is numerically studied and a switching time as fast as 3.6 picoseconds is obtained. Our results indicate the great promise of applying photonic crystal nanobeam microcavities to construct integrated ultrafast tunable photonic devices or circuits incorporating polymer materials with large Kerr nonlinearity and ultrafast response speed.