Photonic Crystals for Quantum and Classical Information Processing a Dissertation Submitted to the Department of Applied Physics and the Committee on Graduate Studies of Stanford University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Photonic crystals provide a tunable electromagnetic environment for controlling the interaction between light and matter. The main theme of this thesis concerns the development of technologies to control this interaction in planar photonic crystals. Work in this area has become possible by advances in three key areas. First, desktop computers have become sufficiently powerful to simulate Maxwell’s equations in complex metal/dielectric structures, which enables designing of novel devices. Second, nanoscale fabrication has advanced to the point that photonic crystals can be fabricated at near-infrared wavelengths with high precision. Third, advances in semiconductor growth have enabled novel semiconductor structures such as high-quality quantum dots and quantum wells. In Chapter 2, we discuss the design and fabrication of photonic crystals. After discussing different design approaches, we describe a new semi-analytic way of photonic crystal design. Then we show a way to directly analyze fabricated nanophotonic structures to explain experiments and improve device processing. In Chapters 3-4, we discuss quantum dot-embedded photonic crystal devices for classical and quantum information processing. We concentrate on individual quantum dots coupled to single a single cavity mode. We show that depending on the strength of this coupling, the dot’s spontaneous emission rate can be modified by up to two orders of magnitude. We explain the results by theory and find agreement with simulations. Then, using a set of tools to fine-tune the interaction between quantum dots and cavities, we also demonstrate the strong coupling regime between single dots and photonic crystal cavities. We first probe the QD-cavity system by PL, which is incoherent, and then by a newly developed coherent technique which we call Coherent