Efficient inverse design of large-area metasurfaces for incoherent light

Incoherent light is ubiquitous, yet designing optical devices that can handle its random nature is very challenging, since directly averaging over many incoherent incident beams can require a huge number of scattering calculations. We show how to instead solve this problem with a reciprocity technique which leads to three orders of magnitude speedup: one Maxwell solve (using any numerical technique) instead of thousands. This improvement enables us to perform efficient inverse design, large scale optimization of the metasurface for applications such as light collimators and concentrators. We show the impact of the angular distribution of incident light on the resulting performance, and show especially promising designs for the case of "annular" beams distributed only over nonzero angles

Database of semiconductor point-defect properties for applications in quantum technologies

Solid-state point defects are attracting increasing attention in the field of quantum information science, because their localized states can act as a spin-photon interface in devices that store and transfer quantum information, which have been used for applications in quantum computing, sensing, and networking. In this work we have performed high-throughput calculations of over 50,000 point defects in various semiconductors including diamond, silicon carbide, and silicon. Focusing on quantum applications, we characterize the relevant optical and electronic properties of these defects, including formation energies, spin characteristics, transition dipole moments, zero-phonon lines. We find 2331 composite defects which are stable in intrinsic silicon, which are then filtered to identify many new optically bright telecom spin qubit candidates and single-photon sources. All computed results and relaxed defect structures are made publicly available online at quantumdefects.com, a living database of defect characteristics which will be continually expanded with new defects and properties, and will enable researchers to select defects tailored to their applications.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure