Efficient first-principles inverse design of nanolasers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a first-principles inverse design method for nanolasers that combines nonlinear Maxwell-Bloch equations with SALT, enabling efficient optimization of laser cavity properties including gain and out-coupling.

Contribution

It presents a novel, computationally efficient inverse design framework for nanolasers based on first-principles physics and topology optimization.

Findings

High-Q cavity regimes enable simplified linear models.

Designs show strong dependence on gain region properties.

Topology optimization improves nanolaser performance.

Abstract

We develop and demonstrate a first-principles approach, based on the nonlinear Maxwell-Bloch equations and steady-state ab-initio laser theory (SALT), for inverse design of nanostructured lasers, incorporating spatial hole-burning corrections, threshold effects, out-coupling efficiency, and gain diffusion. The resulting figure of merit exploits the high-$Q$ regime of optimized laser cavities to perturbatively simplify the nonlinear model to a single linear ''reciprocal'' Maxwell solve. The consequences for laser-cavity design, and in particular the strong dependence on the nature of the gain region, are demonstrated using topology optimization of both 2d and full 3d geometries.