MICRORESONATORS AND PHOTONIC CRYSTALS FOR QUANTUM OPTICS AND SENSING

Abstract

The ability to store and manipulate light on micro-to-nanometer scales opens up doors of opportunity in biological sensing, quantum information, and creating all-optical interconnects on a chip. In this thesis, we present our effort along these directions. We take advantage of silicon nitride photonic crystals and microdisk resonators to confine and manipulate photons in the visible spectrum. We present a novel cavity design to obtain high quality-factor cavities and present our fabrication process. In addition, we present a novel techniques aimed at coupling cadmium-selenide colloidal QDs to photonic crystal cavities and discuss a method for freezing their kinetics through solidifying the liquid. This technique takes advantage of electroosmotic flow in microfluidic channels to control and steer QDs. Moreover, we analyze theoretically some interesting phenomenon, such as, coupling two quantum dots to a cavity.