Inverse design for scalable photonic systems

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in scalable photonic inverse design, highlighting progress in large-scale 3D systems, practical fabrication, diverse materials, and emerging quantum applications, emphasizing the field's evolution and future challenges.

Contribution

It provides an updated comprehensive review of large-scale 3D photonic inverse design, including practical implementation, material systems, and new quantum directions, highlighting recent progress and challenges.

Findings

Progress in large-scale 3D photonic inverse design

Advances in translating inverse design to commercial fabrication

Emerging applications in quantum photonics

Abstract

Over the past two decades, photonic inverse design has emerged as a powerful approach to implement photonic devices with improved performance, or realize new functionalities. While the efforts over the first decade focused on proof of concept devices designed and fabricated in university labs, the focus over the past 5-10 years has shifted towards implementation of scalable photonic systems. This article reviews this recent progress, challenges and new directions in photonics inverse design, thus providing a complementary and updated review of the field. We focus on large scale three dimensional photonic inverse design, including metasurfaces, translation of inverse design to commercial foundries and practical silicon photonics, application of photonic inverse design to different materials systems, wavelengths, and optical effects, and finally new directions such as inverse design of quantum systems.