Coherent beam shaping using two-dimensional photonic crystals

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a theoretical approach to designing a coherent beam-shaper using two-dimensional photonic crystals, optimizing amplitude and phase profiles with a parallel tabu search algorithm.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for designing photonic crystal-based beam-shapers using multi-objective optimization and demonstrates its feasibility.

Findings

Successful formulation of beam shaping as an optimization problem

Use of parallel tabu search for multi-objective optimization

Potential for integrated photonics device design

Abstract

Optical devices based on photonic crystals such as waveguides, lenses and beam-shapers, have received considerable theoretical and experimental attention in recent years. The production of these devices has been facilitated by the wide availability of silicon-on-insulator fabrication techniques. In this theoretical work, we show the possibility to design a coherent PhC-based beam-shaper. The basic photonic geometry used is a 2D square lattice of air holes in a high-index dielectric core. We formulate the beam shaping problem in terms of objective functions related to the amplitude and phase profile of the generated beam. We then use a parallel tabu search algorithm to minimize the two objectives simultaneously. Our results show that optimization of several attributes in integrated photonics design is well within reach of current algorithms.