Ultra compact 2D- PhC based sharp bend splitters for terahertz applications

In this article, T-junction, Y-junction, and E-junction power splitters based on 2D Photonic Crystals (PC) are premeditated. The two-dimensional FDTD method is employed for doing mathematical analysis and the plane Wave Expansion (PWE) method is used for attaining the band structure of the designed Photonic Crystal based optical power splitters. The power splitters are designed with the help of silicon rods having a 3.4 refractive index embedded on an air background which has a refractive index value of n = 1 arranged in a hexagonal manner. A hexagonal lattice is selected for the proposed design as it offers only a small photonic band gap area compared with a square lattice. Silicon material is preferred to design the proposed structure because it offers only low absorption C band spectral region. A comparative investigation of the proposed configuration is done on various aspects by utilizing the Finite difference time domain method and as a result, it is found that the E-junction photonic crystal-based power splitter delivered overall maximum transmission efficiency of 93% than T-junction’s 60% and Y-junction’s 79% and also it offers low insertion loss of 0.32 dB than 1.04 dB & 2.21 dB of Y-junction and T-junction respectively at the operating wavelength of 1.55 µm which is suitable for terahertz communication applications. With the help of photonic crystal, we can design optical components like splitters, resonators etc. with minimized dimensions in the range of micrometres. In general, the designed power splitters are very much appropriate for photonic integrated circuits (PIC) applications because of its miniaturized size of around 12.5 μm2.