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US 2003/0118270 A1Published application
Optical waveguide coupler
AssigneeJapan Science and Technology Corporation
InventorsKenjiro Miyano, Hiroharu Tamaru, Hiroshi Ishikawa
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AssigneeJapan Science and Technology Corporation
InventorsKenjiro Miyano, Hiroharu Tamaru, Hiroshi Ishikawa
Estimating the term…
The present invention provides an optical waveguide coupler which relaxes the phase matching condition and facilitates the coupling between an optical waveguide and a resonator. The light in a multimode optical waveguide (1) is coupled directly to a microsphere resonator (2) via evanescent light. Since the size of the microsphere resonator (2) is very small, the efficiency of coupling between the microsphere resonator (2) and the multimode optical waveguide (1) is low. Therefore, under the nonresonance condition, the influence of the microsphere resonator (2) is small, and light propagation through the multimode optical waveguide (1) is not influenced. However, since the intensity of the light stored in the microsphere resonator (2) is high under the resonance condition, even if the coupling efficiency is low, the microsphere resonator (2) outputs light which has approximately the same power as that of the light in the multimode optical waveguide (1). Therefore, strong coupling condition is always satisfied, and the optical waveguide coupler functions as a filter due to the interference between the light in the multimode optical waveguide (1) and the light that has passed through the microsphere resonator (2).
An optical waveguide coupler including a resonator which is in contact with a plurality of optical waveguides and has a wavelength discrimination function, characterized in that a micro-cylinder resonator is sandwiched between two optical circuit boards each carrying a plurality of optical waveguides such that guided light propagating through each optical waveguide of one optical circuit board and having a wavelength satisfying the resonance condition of the resonator propagates via the resonator to the corresponding optical waveguide of the other optical circuit board and exits from an output end of the corresponding optical waveguide, and that, by utilization of a size effect attained through size reduction of the resonator, influence of the resonator on signal transmission between the optical waveguide and the resonator is reduced under a nonresonance condition, and a condition for phase matching between a guided mode of the optical waveguide and that of the resonator is relaxed under a resonance condition.
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