The Institute for Nanoscale Technology is host to the UTS node of CUDOS—the Centre for Ultrahigh-bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems, an ARC Centre of Excellence involving five national universities. The UTS node of CUDOS focuses on theoretical and computational modelling of photonic devices. We undertake both fundamental and applied research in pursuit of the centre’s goal of developing an all optical signal processor, also known as the “photonic chip”. 

Our work at UTS concerns the modelling of propagation in photonic and plasmonic devices and the means by which they influence emission from sources (e.g., micro lasers) embedded within them.  Much of our work is related to devices based on photonic crystals—periodic structures which are the optical analogues of semiconductors, and in which the geometry of the structure controls the flow of light.  The introduction of defects into an otherwise periodic structure allows the technological potential of photonic crystals to be realised.  Examples of defect structures include waveguides, resonators, filters and photonic crystal fibres.

The rigorous modelling of such devices involves the solution of the Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism using analytic and numerical approaches.  In general, the structures that are of contemporary interest are too complex to be handled by exclusively analytic approaches and so some aspect of numerical simulation is required, with such methods generally referred to as semi-analytic.  In some cases, the structure is so general, or so complex, that purely computational approaches are required, using finite difference, finite element, or finite difference time domain (FDTD) methods as appropriate. In the case of FDTD calculations, we undertake our work on desktop systems (for small problems) and on supercomputing facilities at ac3 in Sydney and the APAC National Facility in Canberra.

While these purely numerical methods provide quite accurate results, they do not provide much in the way of physical insight into the scattering processes  involved, and nor do they take advantage of the geometrical structure to enhance the computational efficiency. It is here that semi-analytic methods may come to the fore, where the structure is amenable to this form of treatment, with these taking advantage of the periodicity to express fields in terms of eigenfunctions (known as Bloch modes), thereby providing outstanding accuracy, high computational efficiency, analytic tractability (e.g., allowing the derivation of elegant asymptotic expansions of certain quantities) and excellent physical insight.

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