Scalable classical and quantum photonics

Recent breakthroughs in photonics design, along with new nanofabrication approaches and heterogeneous integration play crucial roles in building photonics for applications including optical interconnects and quantum technologies. A departure from a traditional photonics design approach can lead to optimal photonics designs that are much better than state of the art in many metrics (smaller, more efficient, more robust). This departure is enabled by development of an inverse design approach and computer software which designs photonic systems by searching through the space of all possible geometries. In fabrication-constrained inverse design in photonics, the full parameter space of fabricable three-dimensional devices is searched, using a variety of optimization algorithms combined with high-speed electromagnetic solvers. This search can be done efficiently by combining fast GPU-based electromagnetic solvers with gradient descent based optimization algorithms. With this approach, novel optoelectronic devices and systems have been designed and demonstrated, including error-free and fast chip-to-chip and on-chip optical interconnects compatible with commercial foundries. Moreover, the approach is material agnostic and fully compatible with quantum photonics platforms in diamond and silicon carbide.