Disorder effects on the coupling strength of coupled photonic crystal slab cavities

We study the effects of disorder on the coupling strength of coupled photonic crystal slab cavities by considering fully-3D electromagnetic calculations. Specifically, we investigate two coupled L3 cavities at 30 degrees and 60 degrees configurations, where the coupling strength J(or photon hopping) is extracted from the simulations in the presence of disorder. We found that the relative fluctuations of the photon hopping are more sensitive to disorder effects than the corresponding fluctuations in the eigen-frequencies of the coupled cavities. Furthermore, for the typical range of disorder in state-of-the-art devices, the J fluctuations are found to increase linearly as a function of the disorder amplitude. This allows one to set upper bounds to the amplitude of fabrication imperfections, for which the coupling predicted by design can still be expected, on average, in a fabricated device.