TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2022] Extreme optics design as a large-scale optimization problem

Date & Time:

Tuesday, February 8, 2022; 1:00 PM EST

Abstract:

Thin large-area structures with aperiodic subwavelength patterns can unleash the full power of Maxwell’s equations for focusing light and a variety of other wave transformation or optical applications. Because of their irregularity and large scale, capturing the full scattering through these devices is one of the most challenging tasks for computational design: enter extreme optics! This talk will present ways to harness the full computational power of modern large-scale optimization in order to design optical devices with thousands or millions of free parameters. We exploit various methods of domain-decomposition approximations, supercomputer-scale topology optimization, laptop-scale “surrogate” models based on Chebyshev interpolation and/or new scientific machine learning models, and other techniques to attack challenging problems: achromatic lenses that simultaneously handle many wavelengths and angles, “deep” images, hyperspectral imaging, and more.

Speaker:

Raphaël Pestourie
MIT

Raphaël has been a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT Mathematics since 2020. Originally from France, Raphaël earned a dual degree between ESSEC Business School and École Centrale Paris. He also earned a Master’s of research in Nanosciences at Université Paris Saclay. In Prof. Xiang Zhang's lab at UC Berkley, he conducted his master’s research on metamaterials. Raphaël earned a PhD in Applied Mathematics with a Secondary Field in Computational Science and Engineering from Harvard University in 2020, originally as a fellow from Fulbright France. His PhD research was about large-scale optimization and numerical methods in nanophotonics, and he was co-advised between Professors Federico Capasso at Harvard and Steven Johnson at MIT. While at Harvard, Raphaël also earned an AM in Statistics and completed significant coursework in data science and the Russian language. He served as a Resident Affiliate (2017-2021) and is now a Non-Resident Tutor (2021-present) with Quincy House at Harvard College, where he advises Harvard undergraduate students, as a primary academic advisor for some and informally for many.

MERL Host:

Matthew Brand

Research Areas:

Applied Physics, Electronic and Photonic Devices, Optimization