# Design of plasmonic directional antennas via evolutionary optimization

## TL;DR

This paper presents an inverse design method for plasmonic nanoantennas using evolutionary optimization and full-field simulations, enabling the creation of versatile, directional optical antennas with potential applications in nano-scale information processing.

## Contribution

It introduces an evolutionary optimization approach combined with electrodynamical simulations for designing plasmonic nanoantennas without initial bias, revealing principles similar to radio-frequency antennas.

## Key findings

- EO-designed antennas exhibit directional scattering properties
- The method is versatile for various scattering problems
- Design rules and physical limitations are identified

## Abstract

We demonstrate inverse design of plasmonic nanoantennas for directional light scattering. Our method is based on a combination of full-field electrodynamical simulations via the Green dyadic method and evolutionary optimization (EO). Without any initial bias, we find that the geometries reproducibly found by EO, work on the same principles as radio-frequency antennas. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by designing various directional optical antennas for different scattering problems. EO based nanoantenna design has tremendous potential for a multitude of applications like nano-scale information routing and processing or single-molecule spectroscopy. Furthermore, EO can help to derive general design rules and to identify inherent physical limitations for photonic nanoparticles and metasurfaces.