Engineering Photonic Crystal Impurity Bands for Multiple Channelled Optical Switches

We report theoretically on the engineering of photonic crystal impurity bands to realize multiple channelled optical switches. The mechanism is based on the confinement of the impurity band in a photonic quantum-well structure, leading to N-quantized confined states coming from N-coupled defects. Due to the strong localization of electromagnetic wave at defect regions, the transmission of confined states are greatly dependent on the defects and then multiple channelled optical switches can be realized by slightly changing the defects by a control light. The dependence of the threshold of such a switch on the layer number of photonic barriers is also given.