Design of slow-light-enhanced bimodal interferometers using dimensionality reduction techniques

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method using principal component analysis to efficiently design slow-light-enhanced bimodal interferometers, achieving compact size and high sensitivity in photonic devices.

Contribution

It presents a novel dimensionality reduction approach for optimizing slow-light interferometers, enabling easier exploration of design parameters and improved device performance.

Findings

All-dielectric interferometers with 33 m² footprint achieved.

Sensors with 19,200 2πrad/RIU·cm sensitivity validated.

Design method applicable to various photonic structures.

Abstract

Interferometers usually require long paths for the ever-increasing requirements of high-performance operation, which hinders the miniaturization and integration of photonic circuits into very compact devices. Slow-light based interferometers provide interesting advantages in terms of both compactness and sensitivity, although their optimization is computationally costly and inefficient, due to the large number of parameters to be simultaneously designed. Here we propose the design of slowlight-enhanced bimodal interferometers by using principal component analysis to reduce the high-dimensional design space. A low-dimensional hyperplane containing all optimized designs is provided and investigated for changes in the silicon core and cladding refractive index. As a result, all-dielectric single-channel interferometers as modulators of only 33 m2 footprint and sensors with 19,200 2pirad/RIUcm sensitivity values are reported and validated by two different simulation methods. This work allows the design and optimization of slow light interferometers for different applications by considering several performance criteria, which can be extended to other photonic structures.