SBIR Phase II: Enabling Ultra-Compact Photonic Integrated Circuits with Designed Disordered Dielectrics

小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第二阶段项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是使互联网基础设施能够跟上爆炸性增长的需求。互联网运营可行性的一个核心方面是光设备在传输、存储、计算和接入链的各个点的交换速度。目前的技术无法满足互联网数据量和访问速度预期增长对速度和稳定性的需求。目前，这些企业的增长速度远远超过了摩尔定律。需要一种颠覆性的光交换方法，使数据管理能够跟上市场需求的步伐。交付这一基本能力不仅将在互联网服务领域提供必要的国际领先地位，还将有助于参与创新的公司直接为其股东及其合作伙伴和附属公司产生重大商业影响。这个小企业创新研究第二阶段项目是一项努力，旨在跨越与物质结构相关的基本物理见解与在为数据中心定价的高密度光互连的新兴市场中将“光半导体”商业化的积极方法之间的鸿沟。直到最近，唯一已知的光子带隙固体是由规则重复、有序的介电材料晶格组成的光子晶体结构。一般认为，晶体的有序性是产生光子带隙的必要条件。这一由来已久的假设现在已被证明是错误的。新的光子带隙结构以抑制密度涨落(超均匀)为特征，包括各向同性的无序结构。这意味着光在光子固体中的传播方式与方向无关(这对于光子晶体是不可能的)。在常规光子晶体和准晶体光子带隙材料中，光波导的布局被严格地限制在特定的晶轴上，而超均匀无序固体光波导的布局规则则没有这样的基本约束。基于光子晶体、准晶体和超均匀无序固体基光子带隙的通用协议和高效计算框架将通过一种强大的新的无梯度优化方法被推广到一大类关键的光子组件。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to allow the Internet infrastructure to keep up with explosive growth demand. A core aspect of Internet operational viability is switching speed of optical devices at various points of the transmission, storage, calculation, and access chain. Current technologies are not poised to be able to meet the speed and stability needs of the projected growth in Internet data volumes and access speed requirements. These are currently growing well beyond a Moore's Law pace. Needed is a disruptive approach to optical switching that will allow data management to keep pace with market needs. Ability to delivery this essential capability will provide not only essential international leadership in internet services, but also avail companies involved in the innovation to make a substantial commercial impact directly for their shareholders and to those of their partners and affiliates. This Small Business Innovation Research phase II project is an effort to cross the chasm between fundamental new physics insights relating to the structure of matter and an aggressive approach to commercializing 'Semiconductors of Light' in an emerging market for high density optical interconnects priced for datacenters. Until recently, the only known photonic bandgap solids were photonic crystal structures consisting of regularly repeating, orderly lattices of dielectric materials. It was generally assumed that crystal order was essential to have photonic bandgaps. This longstanding assumption is now known to be false. New photonic bandgap structures, characterized by suppressed density fluctuations (hyperuniformity), include disordered structures that are isotropic. This means that light propagates the same way through the photonic solid independent of direction (which is impossible for a photonic crystal). While the layout of waveguides in conventional photonic crystal and quasi crystal photonic bandgap materials is tightly-constrained to follow characteristic crystal axes, the layout rules for hyper uniform disordered solid waveguides have no such fundamental constraints. The universal protocol and highly-efficient computational framework covering the full range of photonic crystal, quasi crystal , and hyper uniform disordered solid-based photonic bandgaps will be generalized to a broad class of critically important photonic components by the application of a powerful new gradient-free optimization methods.