Optical modeling, solver, and design of wafer-scale single-enantiomer carbon nanotube film and reconfigurable chiral photonic device

TL;DR

This paper develops optical modeling, a solver, and design tools for wafer-scale single-enantiomer carbon nanotube films, enabling the creation of reconfigurable chiral photonic devices with potential for advanced applications.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive modeling and design framework for wafer-scale single-enantiomer CNT films, including a GPU-accelerated solver and machine learning-based inverse design methods.

Findings

Successful fabrication of wafer-scale single-enantiomer CNT films

Development of a GPU-accelerated transfer matrix solver for bi-anisotropic materials

Design of reconfigurable chiral photonic devices using inverse optimization

Abstract

The interaction of circularly polarized light with chiral matter and functional devices enables novel phenomena and applications. Recently, wafer-scale solid-state single-enantiomer carbon nanotube (CNT) films have become feasible and are emerging as a chiral photonic material platform thanks to their quantum-confinement-induced optical properties and facile scalable assembly. However, optical modeling, solver, and device design tools for such materials are non-existent. Here, we prepare wafer-scale single-enantiomer (6,5) and (11,-5) randomly oriented CNT films and create an optical material model based on measured experimental optical spectra. We also implement a highly-parallel graphic-processing-unit accelerated transfer matrix solver for general bi-anisotropic materials and layered structures. Further, we demonstrate reconfigurable chiral photonic devices in a heterostructure with phase change materials through machine learning-enabled efficient gradient-based inverse design and optimization. Our developed full stack of a chiral photonic material and device hardware platform and a corresponding high-performance differential-programming-enabled solver opens the door for future chiral photonic devices and applications based on single-enantiomer CNT films.