Highly efficient and compact photonic wire splitters on GaAs

Symmetrical optical power T-splitters were fabricated using miniaturized 90° bends with a curvature radius of 2μm and a high transmittance of almost 99% per bend. A constant excess loss of only 1.4dB was achieved at a photonic wire width of 450nm over the wide wavelength range from 1.50to1.58μm. The dependence of the transmittance on the width of the photonic wires of the T-splitter was investigated experimentally and theoretically, and good agreement between experiments and three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain simulations was obtained.