Maximizing the quality factor to mode volume ratio for ultra-small photonic crystal cavities

Small manufacturing-tolerant photonic crystal cavities are systematically designed using topology optimization to enhance the ratio between quality factor and mode volume, Q/V. For relaxed manufacturing tolerance, a cavity with bow-tie shape is obtained which confines light beyond the diffraction limit into a deep-subwavelength volume. Imposition of a small manufacturing tolerance still results in efficient designs, however, with diffraction-limited confinement. Inspired by numerical results, an elliptic ring grating cavity concept is extracted via geometric fitting. Numerical evaluations demonstrate that for small sizes, topology-optimized cavities enhance the Q/V-ratio by up to two orders of magnitude relative to standard L1 cavities and more than one order of magnitude relative to shape-optimized L1 cavities. An increase in cavity size can enhance the Q/V-ratio by an increase of the Q-factor without significant increase of V. Comparison between optimized and reference cavities illustrates that significant reduction of V requires big topological changes in the cavity

Efficient preconditioning of hphp-FEM matrix sequences with slowly-varying coefficients:An application to topology optimization

We previously introduced a preconditioner that has proven effective for hp-FEM dis- cretizations of various challenging elliptic and hyperbolic problems. The construc- tion is inspired by standard nested dissection, and relies on the assumption that the Schur complements can be approximated, to high precision, by Hierarchically-Semi- Separable matrices. The preconditioner is built as an approximate LDMt factorization through a divide-and-conquer approach. This implies an enhanced flexibility which allows to handle unstructured geometric meshes, anisotropies, and discontinuities. We build on our previous numerical experiments and develop a preconditioner- update strategy that allows us handle time-varying problems. We investigate the performance of the precondition along with the update strategy in context of topology optimization of an acoustic cavity