MEMS Tunable Photonic Crystal-Cantilever Cavity

We present an easy-to-implement microelectromechanical systems-based tunable photonic crystal (PC) resonant cavity. This cavity is formed by embedding the tip of an electrostatically bendable cantilever into the center of a PC nanobeam structure. Owing to the presence of the cantilever, band-edge resonant modes occur within the cavity that allow light transmission through a photonic barrier. When a voltage is applied, the cantilever deflection perturbs the optical fields of the band-edge modes; this results in the modulation of both resonant wavelength and quality factor of the modes. The resonant wavelength of the cavity redshifts 13.5 nm when 97 volts is applied.