Samuel P. Groth

Samuel P. Groth, Athanasios G. Polimeridis, Alexandra Tambova et al.

Recently, the volume integral equation (VIE) approach has been proposed as an efficient simulation tool for silicon photonics applications [J. Lightw. Technol. 36, 3765 (2018)]. However, for the high-frequency and strong contrast problems arising in photonics, the convergence of iterative solvers for the solution of the linear system can be extremely slow. The uniform discretization of the volume integral operator leads to a three-level Toeplitz matrix, which is well suited to preconditioning via its circulant approximation. In this paper, we describe an effective circulant preconditioning strategy based on the multi-level circulant preconditioner of Chan and Olkin [Numer. Algorithms 6, 89 (1994)]. We show that this approach proves ideal in the canonical photonics problem of propagation within a uniform waveguide, in which the flow is unidirectional. For more complex photonics structures, such as Bragg gratings, directional couplers, and disk resonators, we generalize our preconditioning strategy via geometrical partitioning (leading to a block-diagonal circulant preconditioner) and homogenization (for inhomogeneous structures). Finally, we introduce a novel memory reduction technique enabling the preconditioner's memory footprint to remain manageable, even for extremely long structures. The range of numerical results we present demonstrates that the preconditioned VIE is fast and has great utility for the numerical exploration of prototype photonics devices.

Samuel P. Groth, David P. Hewett, Stephen Langdon

We present a novel hybrid numerical-asymptotic boundary element method for high frequency acoustic and electromagnetic scattering by penetrable (dielectric) convex polygons. Our method is based on a standard reformulation of the associated transmission boundary value problem as a direct boundary integral equation for the unknown Cauchy data, but with a nonstandard numerical discretization which efficiently captures the high frequency oscillatory behaviour. The Cauchy data is represented as a sum of the classical geometrical optics approximation, computed by a beam tracing algorithm, plus a contribution due to diffraction, computed by a Galerkin boundary element method using oscillatory basis functions chosen according to the principles of the Geometrical Theory of Diffraction. We demonstrate with a range of numerical experiments that our boundary element method can achieve a fixed accuracy of approximation using only a relatively small, frequency-independent number of degrees of freedom. Moreover, for the scattering scenarios we consider, the inclusion of the diffraction term provides an order of magnitude improvement in accuracy over the geometrical optics approximation alone.