No Arabic abstract
To be useful for most scientific and medical applications, compact particle accelerators will require much higher average current than enabled by current architectures. For this purpose, we propose a photonic crystal architecture for a dielectric laser accelerator, referred to as a multi-input multi-output silicon accelerator (MIMOSA), that enables simultaneous acceleration of multiple electron beams, increasing the total electron throughput by at least one order of magnitude. To achieve this, we show that the photonic crystal must support a mode at the $Gamma$ point in reciprocal space, with a normalized frequency equal to the normalized speed of the phase matched electron. We show that the figure of merit of the MIMOSA can be inferred from the eigenmodes of the corresponding infinitely periodic structure, which provides a powerful approach to design such devices. Additionally, we extend the MIMOSA architecture to electron deflectors and other electron manipulation functionalities. These additional functionalities, combined with the increased electron throughput of these devices, permit all-optical on-chip manipulation of electron beams in a fully integrated architecture compatible with current fabrication technologies, which opens the way to unconventional electron beam shaping, imaging, and radiation generation.
Dielectric microstructures have generated much interest in recent years as a means of accelerating charged particles when powered by solid state lasers. The acceleration gradient (or particle energy gain per unit length) is an important figure of merit. To design structures with high acceleration gradients, we explore the adjoint variable method, a highly efficient technique used to compute the sensitivity of an objective with respect to a large number of parameters. With this formalism, the sensitivity of the acceleration gradient of a dielectric structure with respect to its entire spatial permittivity distribution is calculated by the use of only two full-field electromagnetic simulations, the original and adjoint. The adjoint simulation corresponds physically to the reciprocal situation of a point charge moving through the accelerator gap and radiating. Using this formalism, we perform numerical optimizations aimed at maximizing acceleration gradients, which generate fabricable structures of greatly improved performance in comparison to previously examined geometries.
We propose an on-chip optical power delivery system for dielectric laser accelerators based on a fractal tree-branch dielectric waveguide network. This system replaces experimentally demanding free-space manipulations of the driving laser beam with chip-integrated techniques based on precise nano-fabrication, enabling access to orders of magnitude increases in the interaction length and total energy gain for these miniature accelerators. Based on computational modeling, in the relativistic regime, our laser delivery system is estimated to provide 21 keV of energy gain over an acceleration length of 192 um with a single laser input, corresponding to a 108 MV/m acceleration gradient. The system may achieve 1 MeV of energy gain over a distance less than 1 cm by sequentially illuminating 49 identical structures. These findings are verified by detailed numerical simulation and modeling of the subcomponents and we provide a discussion of the main constraints, challenges, and relevant parameters in regards to on-chip laser coupling for dielectric laser accelerators.
Dielectric laser acceleration (DLA) represents a promising approach to building miniature particle accelerators on a chip. However, similar to conventional RF accelerators, an automatic and reconfigurable control mechanism is needed to scale DLA technology towards high energy gains and practical applications. We present a system providing control of the laser coupling to DLA using integrated optics and introduce a novel component for power distribution using a reconfigurable mesh of Mach-Zehnder interferometers. We show how such a mesh may be sequentially and efficiently tuned to optimize power distribution in the circuit and find that this strategy has favorable scaling properties with respect to size of the mesh.
Photonic components based on structured metallic elements show great potential for device applications where field enhancement and confinement of the radiation on a subwavelength scale is required. In this paper we report a detailed study of a prototypical metallo-dielectric photonic structure, where features well known in the world of dielectric photonic crystals, like band gaps and defect modes, are exported to the metallic counterpart, with interesting applications to infrared science and technology, as for instance in quantum well infrared photodetectors, narrow-band spectral filters, and tailorable thermal emitters.
Gradient-based inverse design in photonics has already achieved remarkable results in designing small-footprint, high-performance optical devices. The adjoint variable method, which allows for the efficient computation of gradients, has played a major role in this success. However, gradient-based optimization has not yet been applied to the mode-expansion methods that are the most common approach to studying periodic optical structures like photonic crystals. This is because, in such simulations, the adjoint variable method cannot be defined as explicitly as in standard finite-difference or finite-element time- or frequency-domain methods. Here, we overcome this through the use of automatic differentiation, which is a generalization of the adjoint variable method to arbitrary computational graphs. We implement the plane-wave expansion and the guided-mode expansion methods using an automatic differentiation library, and show that the gradient of any simulation output can be computed efficiently and in parallel with respect to all input parameters. We then use this implementation to optimize the dispersion of a photonic crystal waveguide, and the quality factor of an ultra-small cavity in a lithium niobate slab. This extends photonic inverse design to a whole new class of simulations, and more broadly highlights the importance that automatic differentiation could play in the future for tracking and optimizing complicated physical models.