2014/06/30 by Alexander Y. Piggott, Jesse Lu, Thomas M. Babinec +3 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/srep07210
published as Scientific Reports 4, 7210 (2014) · 17 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. A supplementary section describing the inverse-design algorithm in detail has been added, in addition to minor corrections and updated references
arxiv created 2014/09/17 · arxiv updated 2015/03/25
Nanophotonics has emerged as a powerful tool for manipulating light on chips. Almost all of today's devices, however, have been designed using slow and ineffective brute-force search methods, leading in many cases to limited device performance. In this article, we provide a complete demonstration of our recently proposed inverse design technique, wherein the user specifies design constraints in the form of target fields rather than a dielectric constant profile, and in particular we use this method to demonstrate a new demultiplexing grating. The novel grating, which has not been developed using conventional techniques, accepts a vertical-incident Gaussian beam from a free-space and separates O-band (1300nm) and C-band (1550nm) light into separate waveguides. This inverse design concept is simple and extendable to a broad class of highly compact devices including frequency splitters, mode converters, and spatial mode multiplexers.