Papers › Adjoint method and inverse design for nonlinear nanophotonic devices

Adjoint method and inverse design for nonlinear nanophotonic devices

3 Nov 2018arXiv:1811.01255links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Tyler W. Hughes, Momchil Minkov, Ian A. D. Williamson, Shanhui Fan

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The development of inverse design, where computational optimization techniques are used to design devices based on certain specifications, has led to the discovery of many compact, non-intuitive structures with superior performance. Among various methods, large-scale, gradient-based optimization techniques have been one of the most important ways to design a structure containing a vast number of degrees of freedom. These techniques are made possible by the adjoint method, in which the gradient of an objective function with respect to all design degrees of freedom can be computed using only two full-field simulations. However, this approach has so far mostly been applied to linear photonic devices. Here, we present an extension of this method to modeling nonlinear devices in the frequency domain, with the nonlinear response directly included in the gradient computation. As illustrations, we use the method to devise compact photonic switches in a Kerr nonlinear material, in which low-power and high-power pulses are routed in different directions. Our technique may lead to the development of novel compact nonlinear photonic devices.

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