Inhibition of the emission of electromagnetic modes of photonic crystal cavities with a top mirror

By imaging the angular spectrum of optical modes confined within subwavelength volumes, we investigate the impact of metallic and dielectric surrounding layers on the optical emission properties of planar silicon photonic crystal cavity. By scanning a mirror close to the surface of the cavity, we experimentally show an enhancement of the cavity quality factor Q based on the annihilation of the amplitude of the cavity leaky modes. The experimental observations are in agreement with a model based on transfer matrix formalism.