Enhanced four-wave-mixing effects by large group indices of one-dimensional silicon photonic crystal waveguides

Enhanced four-wave-mixing (FWM) effects have been observed with the help of large group-indices near the band edges in one-dimensional (1-D) silicon photonic crystal waveguides (Si PhCWs). A significant increase of the FWM conversion efficiency of about 17 dB was measured near the transmission band edge of the 1-D PhCW through an approximate 3.2 times increase of the group index from 8 to 24 with respect to the central transmission band region despite a large group-velocity dispersion. Numerical analyses based on the coupled-mode equations for the degenerated FWM process describe the experimentally measured results well. Our results indicate that the 1-D PhCWs are good candidates for large group-index enhanced nonlinearity devices even without having any special dispersion engineering.