Tunable bioinspired spatially-varying random photonic crystals

Metamaterials and photonic crystals are engineered composites that exhibit novel and interesting properties not found using ordinary materials. They have been shown to allow extraordinary control over the electromagnetic field, including molding the flow of energy, amplitude profile of the field, phase of the waves, intermodal coupling, and more. To achieve such control, a set of tools and procedures have been developed to synthesize a new class of spatially variant photonic crystals (SVPCs). Lattice spacing, orientation, fill factor, and other properties of a periodic structure can be simultaneously spatially varied while rendering an overall lattice that is smooth, continuous, and with minimized defects. This effort will produce a customized set of tools and processes needed to generate arbitrarily complex bioinspired SVPCs in a workflow that is easy to follow for the Air Force user. Throughout the design process, the user will interface with helpful GUIs and easy-to-interpret control files to define the basic parameters needed to generate novel lattice designs. The user need not be concerned with the computational electromagnetics, optimization algorithms, nor graphics generation codes that are working in the background to simulate and analyze the designs. These will be custom-coded for numerical optimization and parallelized for maximum speed.