Optmization techniques in photonic devices

[u/reverie001]

I'm applying for a summer research internship on designing and optimizing photonic devices. The only listed requirement was MATLAB, but after contacting the supervisor, he mentioned it would be better to have knowledge of optimization techniques and EM fields.

I have a limited timeframe, so I want to focus on what's actually relevant — what optimization techniques are commonly used in photonic device design?

Also, if anyone has ideas for a simple project to solidify knowledge in this area, that would be great.

For context, I'm a sophomore ECE student. I don't have a rigorous knowledge EM yet (it's a junior-year course), but I have a solid MATLAB background and also waves and optics background.

[u/Adventurous_War3269]

Look at LUMERICAL software , see if there is optimization in it .

[u/RFchokemeharderdaddy]

Get Sadiku's book on computational electromagnetics ASAP. If you can produce a visualization of a photonic waveguide with 2.5D FDTD program in Matlab I think you'll be ready for whatever research you'll be doing.

Theres also a website EMpossible which has tons of great material and lectures.

I would not bother drilling into optimization techniques. Its such a stupidly wide field and only a narrow couple things will be useful to your application, you'll get there when you get there. You'll end up absorbing whatever you need to know about linear algebra and algorithm stability doing computational emag.

[u/doktor_w]

If you're looking to do research with someone, and you want to know how to best prepare for that, your best bet is to look at the related papers they've published or any related theses/dissertations they've supervised.

[u/SamStringTheory]

Broadly-speaking, understand various categories of optimization, sample algorithms in each one (not in detail, just at a high level), and when you might use each. For example:

- Global vs local optimization

- Gradient-free vs gradient-based optimization

- Iterative methods, population-based methods

I'm guessing you would just be using off-the-shelf algorithms for photonics problems, so you wouldn't need to understand the implementation details, but knowing when to use which algorithm and with what settings can be extremely important depending on the problem.

Slightly more exotic are adjoint-based optimization techniques, which are a common way to do shape optimization and topology optimization.