Inverse Designed Couplers for Use in Gallium Arsenide Photonics
Henry Carfagno, Melissa A. Guidry, Joshua Yang, Lauren N. McCabe, Joshua M. O. Zide, Jelena Vučković, Matthew F. Doty
Abstract
Highly efficient photonic couplers are a necessary component of a scalable platform to couple quantum emitters into quantum fiber networks. We inverse-designed couplers for use in gallium arsenide membrane-based photonics that are compatible with indium arsenide quantum dots, one of the highest quality quantum light sources available. We fabricated and tested at least 4 instances of devices following 11 different designs. All inverse-designed structures outperformed the traditional grating outcoupler in a single-mode optical fiber optical setup. Using a novel sleeve and bulk fabrication method allowed for a smaller allowable minimum feature size constraint in the inverse design optimization protocol. Employing this new design constraint improved the average device transmission efficiency from 17.4% to 27.5%. The use of broadband optimization criteria did not result in statically significant improvement in actual bandwidth, but did decrease the variance in the measured bandwidth, suggesting a more robust design.