APPLICATION OF EVOLUTIONARY OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHMS IN COMPUTATIONAL OPTICS

The spatial and spectral treatment of electromagnetic fields express an essential operation regarding, e.g., the functionality of dense integrated optical devices. Such molding of fields can hardly be handled without sophisticated heuristic optimization tools. By means of five design examples we have demonstrated that evolutionary algorithms (EA) are highly qualified to solve "real world" inverse problems considering various applications in the field of planar integrated optics, optical communication technology, and dielectric material modeling as well. In com- parison to other optimization schemes EAs are even able to deliver structural and temporal information of the device under optimization which is an important feature when targeting computer guided engineer- ing and virtual design platforms.