Optimal design of photonic nanojets under uncertainty

Abstract: Photonic nanojets (PNJs) have promising applications as optical probes in super-resolution optical microscopy, Raman microscopy, as well as fluorescence microscopy. In this work, we consider optimal design of PNJs using a heterogeneous lens refractive index with a fixed lens geometry and uniform plane wave illumination. In particular, we consider the presence of manufacturing error of heterogeneous lens, and propose a computational framework of Optimization Under Uncertainty (OUU) for robust optimal design of PNJ. We formulate a risk-averse stochastic optimization problem with the objective to minimize both the mean and the variance of a target function, which is constrained by the Helmholtz equation that governs the 2D transverse electric (2D TE) electromagnetic field in a neighborhood of the lens. The design variable is taken as a spatially-varying field variable, where we use a finite element method for its discretization, impose a total variation penalty to promote its sparsity, and employ an adjoint-based BFGS method to solve the resulting high-dimensional optimization problem. We demonstrate that our proposed OUU computational framework can achieve more robust optimal design than a deterministic optimization scheme to significantly mitigate the impact of manufacturing uncertainty.