The interaction of light with wavelength-scale (nano/micro) structures is being harnessed to design photonic elements with novel functionalities. To design and fabricate such novel elements it is important to simulate these elements first using rigorous vector-field solvers of Maxwell’s Equations. This is because wavelength-scale structures demonstrate polarization-dependent diffraction properties and also because the fabrication of nano/microstructures is costly.
One of the commonly used nanophotonic structure is 1D, 2D or 3D photonic crystals. This course will focus on FDTD simulations of nanophotonic structures with emphasis on photonic crystals that are artificial periodic structures and can be fabricated using nano-imprint and other methods. In the optical realm photonic crystals have dimensions on the order of the wavelength of light, 100s of nanometers. Waveguides, resonators, and other components can be made using photonic crystals. Defects engineered into the periodic crystal structure can control its properties.
We introduce Python programs to simulate light propagation in photonic crystals and thus compute their transmission bandgaps, and reflection spectra. We also model evanescently coupled microresonators and discuss applications to sensing and quantum computing.
Key concepts covered include:
- Interaction of light with wavelength-scale structures: polarisation-dependent diffraction
- Photonic crystals and their applications
- FDTD simulation of photonic crystal band-gaps by computing transmission and reflection spectra
- Photonic Waveguides
- Photonic crystals with defects used as photonic waveguides
- Evanescently coupled microresonators application to sensing and quantum computing
- Coding in Python/Matlab and simulation training with FDTD
- Hands-on training on commercial software to build models and running simulations