Electromagnetic design search and optimisation of photonic bandgap devices on distributed computational resources

Abstract

Photonic crystals are devices with periodically modulated dielectric constant, designed to exhibit band gaps in a frequency spectrum in which electromagnetic waves cannot propagate. Tuning the properties of these structures to achieve precise band gaps before fabrication is of high interest to photonic crystal manufacturers. In this paper, we present the process of finding and optimising a photonic crystal design using a high-throughput Condor-based compute cluster and transparent database technology for easy storage, retrieval and reuse of the created designs. We also demonstrate how a band gap diagram can easily be obtained on a compute cluster when using the developed user interface technology. The optimisation process can easily be adapted to other problem area