Evolutionary optimization of nanophotonic multilayered structures

Bragg mirrors have now been manufactured for decades, and we are nowadays pretty aware that such a structure is ubiquitous in nature. Although there are strong clues that this is the case, it has never been proved that such... [ view full abstract ]

Bragg mirrors have now been manufactured for decades, and we are nowadays pretty aware that such a structure is ubiquitous in nature. Although there are strong clues that this is the case, it has never been proved that such regular structures are optimal.

We have used evolutionary algorithms to optimize multilayered structures and we have found that, using a simple objective function, the algorithms are actually able to retrieve Bragg mirrors as the best structure to reflect light at a given wavelength.

This give a very convincing argument suggesting that Bragg mirror are actually optimal, and gives an opportunity to define more precisely to which sense.
Finally, Bragg mirrors can be considered as a valid test-case to assess the efficiency of a given optimisation algorithm. We thus expect this fundamental work to be useful to the community.