Bending the path of light with a micro-prism

Summary form only given. Within recent years optics has enabled to increase the volume and efficiency of data transmission by orders of magnitude. However, a primary issue in integrated optics is still the rather large radius of curvature of waveguiding bends required to avoid radiative losses. Therefore, various efforts have been made to provide for highly efficient optical bends. It was proposed to use curved defect channels in a two-dimensional photonic crystal. However, insertion losses as well as scattering into the third dimension may deteriorate the performance. Recently it was shown that similar effects can be achieved by adding microresonators to the bends./sup 2/ The latter approach seems to be restricted to materials with high index contrasts, as e.g. semiconductors and air. However, an extension into the third dimension is not obvious, because the index contrast in conventional layered structures is much lower. Here we propose another scheme, which is suitable for low index materials as silica and which can be used to obtain almost arbitrary deflection angles. We put forward a design concept and evaluate the performance of the proposed structures by means of a finite difference time domain calculation.