1.7k citations · 2.9k across the 36 of their papers we have counts for
29 papers · 1 filter
Gearbox cavities: Ultrahigh wave confinement via broken rotational symmetry
Alessio Amaolo, Sean Molesky, Alejandro W. Rodriguez +3
Cavity enhancement of emission from a point source typically relies on structures that preserve its cylindrical symmetry, such as circular Bragg gratings. Combining inverse design…
Spatial-Spectral Trade-offs in Metasurface-Based Snapshot Hyperspectral Imaging
Liam Fitzpatrick, Sean Molesky, Kai Wang
Snapshot hyperspectral imaging maps a spatial--spectral datacube onto a two-dimensional detector, with recoverability depending on the datacube sampling regime, the scene prior, an…
Optically Incoherent Photonic Mutual Information
Francis J. Chen, Alessio Amaolo, Pengning Chao +3
While traditional evaluations of optical information transfer rely on disjointed abstractions to bridge electromagnetic propagation, coherence, and communication theory, we introdu…
Indexed singular value bounds on scattering operators: How many channels can a photonic device support?
Paul Virally, Pengning Chao, Alessio Amaolo +2
Spectral properties of scattering operators, and their dependence on geometry, are of crucial importance to photonic design, enabling low-rank approximations and improved understan…
Bounds as blueprints: towards optimal and accelerated photonic inverse design
Pengning Chao, Alessio Amaolo, Sean Molesky +1
Our ability to structure materials at the nanoscale has, and continues to, enable key advances in optical control. In pursuit of optimal photonic designs, substantial progress has…
Maximum Shannon Capacity of Photonic Structures
Alessio Amaolo, Pengning Chao, Benjamin Strekha +4
Information transfer through electromagnetic waves is an important problem that touches a variety of technologically relevant applications, including computing and telecommunicatio…
Limitations on bandwidth-integrated passive cloaking
Benjamin Strekha, Alessio Amaolo, Jewel Mohajan +3
We present a general framework for the computation of structure-agnostic bounds on the performance of passive cloaks over a nonzero bandwidth. We apply this framework in 2D to the…
Physical limits on Raman scattering: the critical role of pump and signal co-design
Alessio Amaolo, Pengning Chao, Thomas J. Maldonado +2
We present a method for deriving limits on Raman scattering in structured media and exploit it to constrain the maximum Raman signal resulting from a planewave incident on either a…
Suppressing electromagnetic local density of states via slow light in lossy quasi-1d gratings
Benjamin Strekha, Pengning Chao, Rodrick Kuate Defo +2
We propose a spectral-averaging procedure that enables computation of bandwidth-integrated local density of states (LDOS) from a single scattering calculation, and exploit it to in…
Can photonic heterostructures provably outperform single-material geometries?
Alessio Amaolo, Pengning Chao, Thomas J. Maldonado +2
Recent advances in photonic optimization have enabled calculation of performance bounds for a wide range of electromagnetic objectives, albeit restricted to single-material systems…
Fundamental limits on second harmonic generation
Jewel Mohajan, Pengning Chao, Weiliang Jin +2
Recent advances in fundamental performance limits for power quantities based on Lagrange duality are proving to be a powerful theoretical tool for understanding electromagnetic wav…
Maximum Electromagnetic Local Density of States via Material Structuring
Pengning Chao, Rodrick Kuate Defo, Sean Molesky +1
The electromagnetic local density of states (LDOS) is crucial to many aspects of photonics engineering, from enhancing emission of photon sources to radiative heat transfer and pho…
Trace Expressions and Associated Limits for Non-Equilibrium Casimir Torque
Benjamin Strekha, Sean Molesky, Pengning Chao +2
We exploit fluctuational electrodynamics to present trace expressions for the torque experienced by arbitrary objects in a passive, non-absorbing, rotationally invariant background…
Physical limits on electromagnetic response
Pengning Chao, Benjamin Strekha, Rodrick Kuate Defo +2
Photonic devices play an increasingly important role in advancing physics and engineering, and while improvements in nanofabrication and computational methods have driven dramatic…
-Operator Limits on Optical Communication: Metaoptics, Computation, and Input-Output Transformations
Sean Molesky, Pengning Chao, Jewel Mohajan +3
We present an optimization framework based on Lagrange duality and the scattering operator of electromagnetism to construct limits on the possible features that may be…
Hierarchical Mean-Field Operator Bounds on Electromagnetic Scattering: Upper Bounds on Near-Field Radiative Purcell Enhancement
Sean Molesky, Pengning Chao, Alejandro W. Rodriguez
We show how the central equality of scattering theory, the definition of the operator, can be used to generate hierarchies of mean-field constraints that act as natura…
Global operator bounds on electromagnetic scattering: Upper bounds on far-field cross sections
Sean Molesky, Pengning Chao, Weiliang Jin +1
We present a method based on the scattering operator, and conservation of net real and reactive power, to provide physical bounds on any electromagnetic design objecti…
-operator bounds on angle-integrated absorption and thermal radiation for arbitrary objects
Sean Molesky, Weiliang Jin, Prashanth S. Venkataram +1
We derive fundamental per-channel bounds on angle-integrated absorption and thermal radiation for arbitrary bodies---for any given material susceptibility and bounding region---tha…
Dual-Band Quasi-Coherent Radiative Thermal Source
Ryan Starko-Bowes, Jin Dai, Ward Newman +9
Thermal radiation from an unpatterned object is similar to that of a gray body. The thermal emission is insensitive to polarization, shows only Lambertian angular dependence, and i…
Inverse Design of Compact Multimode Cavity Couplers
Weiliang Jin, Sean Molesky, Zin Lin +2
Efficient coupling between on-chip sources and cavities plays a key role in silicon photonics. However, despite the importance of this basic functionality, there are few systematic…
Material Scaling and Frequency-Selective Enhancement of Near-Field Radiative Heat Transfer for Lossy Metals in Two Dimensions via Inverse Design
Weiliang Jin, Sean Molesky, Zin Lin +1
The super-Planckian features of radiative heat transfer in the near-field are known to depend strongly on both material and geometric design properties. However, the relative impor…
Outlook for inverse design in nanophotonics
Sean Molesky, Zin Lin, Alexander Y. Piggott +3
Recent advancements in computational inverse design have begun to reshape the landscape of structures and techniques available to nanophotonics. Here, we outline a cross section of…
Thermal graphene metamaterials and epsilon-near-zero high temperature plasmonics
Sarang Pendharker, Huan Hu, Sean Molesky +7
The key feature of a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) emitter is the enhancement of thermal emission corresponding to energies just above the bandgap of the absorbing photovoltaic cell and…
Definition of Polaritonic Fluctuations in Natural Hyperbolic Media: Applications to Hexagonal Boron Nitride, Bismuth Selenide and the Spontaneous Emission Sum Rule
Sean Molesky, Zubin Jacob
The discovery of photonic hyperbolic dispersion surfaces in certain van der Waals bonded solids, such as hexagonal boron nitride and bismuth selenide (a topological insulator), off…