CDI-Type I: Computer Aided Design of Nanostructured Optical Materials

University Of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis MN

Investigators

Abstract

TECHNICAL SUMMARY This award is made on a proposal submitted to the Cyberenabled Discovery and Innovation initiative. This award supports research to develop computational tools to study the interaction of light with nanostructured optical materials, also known as photonic crystals. These tools will be part of a computer aided design system that can be used to create new individual photonic crystals and new surface coatings that contain photonic crystals. Development will be guided by the needs of the community that designs and fabricates nanostructured materials. The system will be evaluated by using it to create a photonic crystal with specific optical properties. The investigation of how light interacts with nanostructured optical materials will lead to an understanding of complexity in a built system. The periodic layout and minute size of the constituent building blocks makes a photonic crystal geometrically complex. This geometric complexity leads to optical complexity because the full wave model of light must be taken into account, and diffraction effects must be considered. Finally, three distinctly different physical scales must be carefully modeled, from the structure of an individual photonic crystal, to the composition of a small volume of surface coating, to the scale of a small object covered with the surface coating. Computational thinking will be used to determine the structure of the system and to design individual modules within the system. A finite difference time domain technique will be used to solve physical optics problems for an individual photonic crystal, a ray tracing approach will be employed to perform geometric optics calculations for a surface coating that contains photonic crystals, and computer graphics rendering techniques will be utilized to depict the color appearance of the surface coating when applied to a three dimensional object. The powerful graphics processors available today on PC graphics cards will be employed to accelerate the finite difference time domain, ray tracing, and rendering algorithms. Novel numerical solution techniques will be explored to improve the performance of both the physical optics and geometric optics simulations. The PIs will create a metallic photonic crystal that will improve the efficiency of incandescent light bulbs. Other novel thermophotovoltaic and plasmonic photonic crystals may be developed. As new surface coatings that reflect light in interesting new ways become available, the PIs plan to extend a variety of possible industrial and architectural designs. NONTECHNICAL SUMMARY This award is made on a proposal submitted to the Cyberenabled Discovery and Innovation initiative. This project addresses fundamental research issues in a topical area of electronic and photonic materials science having technological relevance. An interdisciplinary research team that includes a computer scientist, a materials researcher, and a mathematician will develop computational tools to design nanostructured optical materials, or photonic crystals. The computational tools will enable accurate calculations of how light interacts with photonic crystals which are materials that are structured to have a periodicity that interacts with light to lead to specific optical properties, such as particular frequencies of light which are not transmitted though the crystal. The computational tools that the PIs will develop will enable computer assisted design of photonic crystals with specific properties. As a test of the computational tools, the PIs plan to create a metallic photonic crystal that will improve the efficiency of incandescent light bulbs. The PIs will also develop novel instructional materials to make the principles of photonic crystals accessible to the general public.