Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Lumerical Solutions Inc. (Vancouver, BC) has built a thriving company around a software tool that has proven to be a critical component of worldwide R&D on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT SPG Target Area) devices and systems. Their success owes much to the emergence of communication and sensing applications based on sophisticated optical device structures that are fabricated not by lens makers and instrument builders, but rather by advanced lithographic patterning technologies adapted from the microelectronics industry. These structures, sometimes referred to as microphotonic, typically incorporate sculpted materials with characteristic dimensions on the order of hundreds of nanometers, comparable to the wavelength of light they manipulate. The structure-property relation is most often non-intuitive and therefore requires sophisticated simulations. Lumerical's software allows scientists and engineers to accurately simulate and visualize the electrodynamic behaviour of such structures by solving the macroscopic Maxwell Equations ""exactly"", to within numerical limitations. A key factor in customers adopting this tool has been the plethora of real physical systems that behave as predicted by the simulations. This proposal describes a program where academic physicists, engineers and chemists work closely with Lumerical Solutions Inc. in carrying out leading edge research on structures that incorporate nanoscale resonant electronic particles in microphotonic devices. The goal is the development and validation of an industry-leading modelling tool for next generation, nanophotonic devices.