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Optical metasurfaces consist of densely arranged unit cells that manipulate light through various light confinement and scattering processes. Due to its unique advantages, such as high performance, small form factor and easy integration with semiconductor devices, metasurfaces have been gathering increasing attention in fields such as displays, imaging, sensing and optical computation. Despite advances in fabrication and characterization, a viable design prediction for suitable optical response remains challenging for complex optical metamaterial systems. The computation cost required to obtain the optimal design exponentially grows as the design complexity increases. Furthermore, the design prediction is challenging since the inverse problem is often ill-posed. In recent years, deep learning (DL) methods have shown great promise in the area of inverse design. Inspired by this and the capability of DL to produce fast inference, we introduce a physics-informed DL framework to expedite the computation for the inverse design of metasurfaces. Addition of the physics-based constraints improve generalizability of the DL model while reducing data burden. Our approach introduces a tandem DL architecture with physics-based learning to alleviate the nonuniqueness issue by selecting designs that are scientifically consistent, with low error in design prediction and accurate reconstruction of optical responses. To prove the concept, we focus on the inverse design of a representative plasmonic device that consists of metal gratings deposited on a dielectric film on top of a metal substrate. The optical response of the device is determined by the geometrical dimensions as well as the material properties. The training and testing data are obtained through Rigorous Coupled-Wave Analysis (RCWA), while the physics-based constraint is derived from solving the electromagnetic (EM) wave equations for a simplified homogenized model. We consider the prediction of design for the optical response of a single wavelength incident or a spectrum of wavelength in the visible light range. Our model converges with an accuracy up to 97% for inverse design prediction with the optical response for the visible light spectrum as input. The model is also able to predict design with accuracy up to 96% and optical response reconstruction accuracy of 99% for optical response of a single wavelength of light as input. 

Liquid Crystalline Elastomers (LCEs) are active materials that are of interest due to their programmable response to various external stimuli such as light and heat. When exposed to these stimuli,... 

This work develops a multiscale modeling framework for defects in crystals with general geometries and boundary conditions in which ionic interactions are important, with potential application to, e.g., ionic solids and electric field interactions with materials. The overall strategy is posed in the framework of the Quasicontinuum multiscale method; specifically, the use of a finite-element inspired kinematic description enables a significant reduction in the large number of degrees of freedom to describe the atomic positions. The key advance of this work is a method for the efficient and accurate treatment of nonlocal electrostatic charge-charge interactions without restrictions on the geometry or boundary conditions. Electrostatic interactions are long-range with slow decay, and hence require consideration of all pairs of charges making a brute-force approach computationally prohibitive. The method proposed here accounts for the exact charge-charge interactions in the near-field and uses a coarse-grained approximation in the far-field. The coarse-grained approximation and the associated errors are rigorously derived based on the limit of a finite body with a small periodic lengthscale, thereby enabling the errors in the approximation to be controlled to a desired tolerance. The method is applied to a simple model of Gallium Nitride and it is shown that electrostatic interactions can be approximated with a desired level of accuracy using the proposed methodology. 

We consider electrostatic interactions in two classes of nanostructures embedded in a three dimensional space: (1) helical nanotubes, and (2) thin films with uniform bending (i.e., constant mean curvature). Starting from the atomic scale with a discrete distribution of dipoles, we obtain the continuum limit of the electrostatic energy; the continuum energy depends on the geometric parameters that define the nanostructure, such as the pitch and twist of the helical nanotubes and the curvature of the thin film. We find that the limiting energy is local in nature. This can be rationalized by noticing that the decay of the dipole kernel is sufficiently fast when the lattice sums run over one and two dimensions, and is also consistent with prior work on dimension reduction of continuum micromagnetic bodies to the thin film limit. However, an interesting contrast between the discrete-to-continuum approach and the continuum dimension reduction approaches is that the limit energy in the latter depends only on the normal component of the dipole field, whereas in the discrete-to-continuum approach, both tangential and normal components of the dipole field contribute to the limit energy. 

This work presents a machine-learning approach to predict peak-stress clusters in heterogeneous polycrystalline materials. Prior work on using machine learning in the context of mechanics has largely focused on predicting the effective response and overall structure of stress fields. However, their ability to predict peak – which are of critical importance to failure – is unexplored, because the peak-stress clusters occupy a small spatial volume relative to the entire domain, and hence require computationally expensive training. This work develops a deep-learning-based convolutional encoder–decoder method that focuses on predicting peak-stress clusters, specifically on the size and other characteristics of the clusters in the framework of heterogeneous linear elasticity. This method is based on convolutional filters that model local spatial relations between microstructures and stress fields using spatially weighted averaging operations. The model is first trained against linear elastic calculations of stress under applied macroscopic strain in synthetically generated microstructures, which serves as the ground truth. The trained model is then applied to predict the stress field given a (synthetically generated) microstructure and then to detect peak-stress clusters within the predicted stress field. The accuracy of the peak-stress predictions is analyzed using the cosine similarity metric and by comparing the geometric characteristics of the peak-stress clusters against the ground-truth calculations. It is observed that the model is able to learn and predict the geometric details of the peak-stress clusters and, in particular, performed better for higher (normalized) values of the peak stress as compared to lower values of the peak stress. These comparisons showed that the proposed method is well-suited to predict the characteristics of peak-stress clusters.