On the suitability of rigorous coupled-wave analysis for fast optical force simulations

TL;DR

This paper shows that rigorous coupled-wave analysis (RCWA) is a significantly faster alternative to FDTD for optical force simulations on periodic nanostructures, enabling efficient design on standard laptops.

Contribution

The study demonstrates that RCWA can perform optical force calculations approximately ten times faster than FDTD with comparable accuracy, suitable for optical design optimization.

Findings

RCWA is about 10 times faster than FDTD.

Speedup achieved on consumer-grade laptops with GPU.

Accuracy of RCWA is sufficient for optical force simulations.

Abstract

Optical force responses underpin nanophotonic actuator design, which requires a large number of force simulations to optimize structures. Commonly used computation methods, such as the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method, are resource intensive and require large amounts of calculation time when multiple structures need to be compared during optimization. This research demonstrates that performing optical force calculations on periodic structures using the rigorous coupled-wave analysis method is typically on the order of 10 times faster than FDTD with sufficient accuracy to suit optical design purposes. Moreover, this speed increase is available on consumer grade laptops with a CUDA-compatible GPU avoiding the need for a high performance computing resource.