The field confinement aspect of a multilayer cavity resonator formed by a one-dimensional photonic crystal with prism wedge configuration is described in this paper. The prism wedge consists of alternating dielectric layers and is used for the construction of polygon multilayered structures with different symmetries like C 4v-square and C 6v-hexagon. Field confinement is studied by finding the resonant modes and quality factors (Q) of the proposed geometries. The computed Q factors for the two-dimensional geometries (the third dimension is taken to be infinity) are of the order of 10 3-10 7. On the other hand, for the finite height of the cavity, the estimated Q factor is found to be of the order of 10 4. An attempt has been taken to achieve the vertical confinement of light for a few of the resonant modes so that the proposed cavities may be implemented for microwave applications, especially in spectroscopic techniques. © 2011 American Institute of Physics.