Inverse Design of an All-Dielectric Nonlinear Polaritonic Metasurface

Year: 2025

Authors: Stich S., Mohajan J., de Ceglia D., Carletti L., Jung H., Karl N., Brener I., Rodriguez A.W., Belkin M.A., Sarma R.

Autors Affiliation: Tech Univ Munich, Walter Schottky Inst, D-85748 Garching, Bavaria, Germany; Princeton Univ, Dept Elect & Comp Engn, Princeton, NJ 08544 USA; Univ Brescia, Natl Inst Opt Nat Res Council INO CNR, I-25121 Brescia, Italy; Univ Brescia, Dept Informat Engn, I-25121 Brescia, Italy; Sandia Natl Labs, Ctr Integrated Nanotechnol, Albuquerque, NM 87123 USA; Sandia Natl Labs, Albuquerque, NM 87123 USA.

Abstract: Nonlinear metasurfaces offer the ability to realize optical nonlinear devices with unparalleled properties compared to nonlinear crystals, due to the interplay between photonic resonances and materials properties. The complicated interdependency between efficiency and emission directionality of the nonlinear optical signal on the existence, localization, and lifetimes of photonic resonances, as well as on the nonlinear susceptibility, makes it extremely difficult to design optimal metasurfaces using conventional materials and geometries. Inverse design using topology optimization is a powerful design tool for photonic structures, but traditional approaches developed for linear photonics are not suitable for such high dimensional nonlinear problems. Here, we use a topology optimization approach to inverse-design a fabrication-robust nonlinear metasurface that includes quantum-engineered resonant nonlinearities in semiconductor heterostructures for efficient and directional second harmonic generation. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that under practical constraints, among all the parameters, the nonlinear modal overlap emerges as the dominant parameter that enhances conversion efficiency, a finding that contrasts with intuition-driven studies that often emphasize Purcell enhancement. Our results demonstrate an efficient approach for optimizing nonlinear processes in nanophotonic structures for classical and quantum light sources, quantum information applications, and communication.

Journal/Review: ACS NANO

Volume: 19 (18)      Pages from: 17374  to: 17384

More Information: This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering and performed, in part, at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, an Office of Science User Facility operated for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science. The TUM group acknowledges partial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), project number 506515587. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International, Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525. This paper describes objective technical results and analysis. Any subjective views or opinions that might be expressed in the paper do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Energy or the United States Government.
KeyWords: nonlinear optics; second-harmonic generation; all-dielectric metasurfaces; inverse design; polaritons; III-V semiconductors; intersubband transitions
DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.4c16934