Application-tailored optimisation of photonic crystal waveguides

Photonic crystal (PhC) waveguides are used for a wide range of applications with diverse performance metrics. A waveguide optimised for one application may not be suitable for others and no one-size-fits-all solution exists. Therefore each application requires a specialised waveguide design, a computationally and time intensive process. Here, we present a hybrid, multi-objective optimisation routine for PhC waveguides, to efficiently guide the device design. The algorithm can be configured to optimise for a wide range of performance metrics and applications. We demonstrate optimisations for three different applications: slow light performance, propagation loss due to fabrication disorder and delay line applications. For each optimisation target, our routine quickly finds practical waveguide designs (<48 h, on a laptop computer) that match or exceed the performance of state-of-the-art devices designed by the community over the last 10 years. This is also the first time that scattering loss from fabrication disorder has been incorporated into an optimisation algorithm, ensuring realistic predictions of a PhC waveguide design's practical performance.