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Light can exert forces on objects, promising to propel a meter-scale lightsail to near the speed of light. The key to address many challenges in such an ambition hinges on the nanostructuring of lightsails to tailor their optical scattering properties. In this letter, we present a first exhaustive study of photonic design of lightsails by applying large-scale optimization techniques to a generic geometry based on stacked photonic crystal layers. The optimization is performed by rigorous coupled-wave analysis amended with automatic differentiation methods for adjoint-variable gradient evaluations. Employing these methods the propulsion efficiency of a lightsail that involves a tradeoff between high broadband reflectivity and mass reduction is optimized. Surprisingly, regardless of the material choice, the optimal structures turn out to be simply one-dimensional subwavelength gratings, exhibiting nearly 50% improvement in acceleration distance performance compared to prior studies. Our framework can be extended to address other lightsail challenges such as thermal management and propulsion stability, and applications in integrated photonics such as compact mirrors.
The Starshot lightsail project aims to build an ultralight spacecraft (nanocraft) that can reach Proxima Centauri b in approximately 20 years, requiring propulsion with a relativistic velocity of ~60 000 km/s. The spacecrafts acceleration approach cu
We present a gradient-based optimization strategy to design broadband grating couplers. Using this method, we are able to reach, and often surpass, a user-specified target bandwidth during optimization. The designs produced for 220 nm silicon-on-insu
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 key developments at the intersection of these two fields: moving from
We suggest a broadband optical unidirectional arrayed nanoantenna consisting of equally spaced nanorods of gradually varying length. Each nanorod can be driven by near-field quantum emitters radiating at different frequencies or, according to the rec
In recent years, the development of nanophotonic devices has presented a revolutionary means to manipulate light at nanoscale. Recently, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have displayed powerful ability in the inverse design of nanophotonic devices.