Physics-Informed PointNets for Modeling Electromagnetic Scattering from All-Dielectric Metasurfaces with Inclined Nanopillars

Abstract: Metasurfaces are innovative planar optical structures capable of manipulating incident light properties. Accurate and computationally efficient modeling of such metasurfaces, particularly those with irregular geometries, remains a challenge for conventional solvers. In this work, we present a mesh-free Physics-Informed PointNet (PIPN) to model electromagnetic scattering from all-dielectric metasurfaces that feature spatially varying nanopillars. Our approach uses the PointNet architecture to directly encode spatially varying material properties into the Physics-Informed Machine Learning (PIML) framework. We demonstrate the generalization capability of our PIPN through evaluations on datasets; these datasets are generated with varying refractive indices representing common dielectric materials. Furthermore, the inclination angles are varied within each dataset, which represent expected manufacturing defects. Overall, our method provides a promising, mesh-free framework for accurate and efficient modeling of complex optical structures represented by irregular geometries.