Efficient inverse design of large-area metasurfaces for incoherent light

TL;DR

This paper introduces a reciprocity-based method that drastically accelerates the inverse design of large-area metasurfaces for incoherent light, enabling efficient optimization for applications like collimators and concentrators.

Contribution

The authors develop a reciprocity technique that reduces the computational cost of designing metasurfaces for incoherent light by three orders of magnitude, facilitating large-scale inverse design.

Findings

Reciprocity technique achieves 1000x speedup in simulations.

Designs optimized for specific angular distributions, especially annular beams.

Promising metasurface designs for incoherent light applications.

Abstract

Incoherent light is ubiquitous, yet designing optical devices that can handle its random nature is very challenging, since directly averaging over many incoherent incident beams can require a huge number of scattering calculations. We show how to instead solve this problem with a reciprocity technique which leads to three orders of magnitude speedup: one Maxwell solve (using any numerical technique) instead of thousands. This improvement enables us to perform efficient inverse design, large scale optimization of the metasurface for applications such as light collimators and concentrators. We show the impact of the angular distribution of incident light on the resulting performance, and show especially promising designs for the case of "annular" beams distributed only over nonzero angles.