From inverse design to implementation of practical photonics (Conference Presentation)

We have recently developed a computational approach to inverse-design photonics based on desired performance, with fabrication constraints and structure robustness incorporated in design process. Our approach performs physics guided search through the full parameter space until an optimal solution is reached. Resulting device designs are non-intuitive, but are fabricable using standard techniques, resistant to temperature variations of hundreds of degrees, typical fabrication errors, and they outperform state of the art counterparts by orders of magnitide in footprint, efficiency and stability. This is completely different from conventional approach to design photonics, which is almost always performed by brute-force or intuition-guided tuning of a few parameters of known structures, until satisfactory performance is achieved, and which almost always leads to sub-optimal designs. Apart from integrated photonics, our approach is also applicable to any other optical and quantum optical devices and systems. We illustrate this with a number of demonstrated photonic devices and circuits in silicon and in diamond.