Temperature tuning of the optical properties of planar photonic crystal microcavities

We report on the temperature tuning of the optical properties of photonic crystal (PhC) microcavities. Planar and one-dimensional cavities were made from two-dimensional PhCs etched in GaAs and InP based vertical waveguides. These systems were optically characterized by an internal light source technique. The samples were mounted on a Peltier stage in order to vary the temperature from 20 to 76 °C. Linear dependence of the resonance wavelengths with respect to the temperature is observed with gradients $\text{dλ/dT=0.09}$ and 0.1 nm/°C for GaAs and InP based cavities, respectively. These results are in agreement with theoretical calculations based on the thermal dependence of the refractive index of the PhC semiconductor component.