Slow light engineering in photonic crystals

Light showing extremely slow propagation (known as slow light) provides various effects such as spatial compression of optical signals, buffering, convolution integral calculation, beam forming, and enhancement of optical absorption, gain, nonlinearity, and so on. To generate such light, very large material or structural dispersion is used. Photonic crystal waveguides are good candidates for many device applications since they can easily generate slow light at room temperature. This paper discusses the potential of slow light devices while explaining some critical issues, such as the delay-bandwidth product and the dispersion compensation.