I-Corps: Composite Photonics

这个I-Corps项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力在于满足快速发展的材料科学，光学，光子学和电信行业的需求。总的来说，光学和光子学几乎触及现代生活的每一个部分。这些行业的进一步发展需要高效设计和利用越来越复杂的材料和界面。拟议的项目有可能通过快速有效地表征、设计和优化复杂的结构化介质来满足这一基本需求。随着新材料和界面的出现，光学和光子学公司将有潜力大幅提高显微镜的分辨率，提高雷达和望远镜的性能，开发新的光源，（激光，LED），新的光路由器（滤波器、反射器、扩散器）、电磁辐射的新型吸收器和探测器这个I-Corps项目的智力价值在于了解一个强大的专有软件包的商业化潜力。这款多功能软件可以快速准确地计算复杂周期性复合结构材料和界面（如衍射光栅、光子晶体和超材料）的透射、反射、吸收和散射。在最近的基础科学研究中，开发的代码被用于（i）设计和优化新的高分辨率和高速显微镜，可用于表征纳米颗粒和病毒，（ii）了解新结构界面的光学响应，具有超高的透明度，结合与铜线相当的电导，（iii）用于转向和引导光的新衍射结构。研究表明，存在大量的材料和界面，其中软件包比商业上可用的有限元和有限差分软件更快，更准确。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project lies in addressing the needs of the rapidly developing materials science, optics, photonics, and telecommunications industries. Collectively, optics and photonics touch almost every part of modern life. Further development in these industries requires efficient design and utilization of ever-more-complex materials and interfaces. The proposed project has potential to address this fundamental need by enabling quick and efficient characterization, design, and optimization of complex structured media. With new materials and interfaces at hand, optics and photonics companies will have potential to, for example, drastically improve resolution of microscopes, improve the performance of radars and telescopes, develop new sources of light (lasers, LEDs), new routers of light (filters, reflectors, diffusers), new absorbers and detectors of electromagnetic radiation (CCDs, solar cells), as well as new active optical components (such as touch screens and displays).The intellectual merit of this I-Corps project is aimed at understanding the commercialization potential of a powerful proprietary software package. The versatile software allows for rapid and accurate calculation of transmission, reflection, absorption, and scattering of complex periodic composite structured materials and interfaces such as diffractive gratings, photonic crystals, and metamaterials. In the recent fundamental science studies the developed codes were used to (i) design and optimize new high resolution and high-speed microscopy that can be potentially used to characterize nanoparticles and viruses, (ii) understand optical response of new structured interfaces that have ultra-high transparency combined with conductance comparable to that of copper wires, (iii) new diffractive structures for steering and guiding of light. The research has demonstrated that there exists a large class of materials and interfaces, where the software package is orders-of-magnitude faster and more accurate than commercially available finite-elements and finite-difference software.