Photonic Crystal Chip-scale Optical Networks

Photonics research is increasingly focusing on integrated photonic chip platforms, built around photonic crystals, nanoscale devices and hybrid integration. Designing such complex devices requires ever more powerful multi-layered simulators. We propose to develop the next generation of photonic modeling tools based on a new graphical hierarchical circuit level software tool. This tool will balance speed and efficiency, by allowing the connection and interaction of different simulators, so that appropriate numerical methods can be applied to different parts of a circuit; field representations can be transformed between simulators; and models at different levels of sophistication from microscopic fields to coarse S-matrices may be connected. The work will also provide new algorithms and descriptions for modeling devices in exotic anistropic, nonlinear and dispersive materials. In particular, we target fast, accurate modeling of metallic nano-devices exhibiting plasmonic effects.