Designing photonic crystal waveguides for broadband four-wave mixing applications

We present photonic crystal waveguide designs which exhibit large four-wave mixing efficiencies over a wide wavelength region. These designs are identified using an optimization process taking into account sophisticated figure-of-merits that depend on the pump bandwidth and the signal/pump tunability. The obtained designs achieve up to -18.9  dB conversion efficiency, tunable over a 10 nm tunability range. We also present alternative designs that are less efficient but have smaller power requirements and are far more compact.