iOptics Seminar on Computational Electrodynamics of Nanophotonic Device Design

Speaker: Dr. Ardavan Oskooi
Topic:  Leveraging Advances in Computational Electrodynamics to Enable New Kinds of Nanophotonic Device Design
Date: Wednesday, November 4th, 2015
Time: 12:00 PM  – 1:00 PM
Location: 3269 Beckman Institute
Sponsors: OSA Student Chapter, SPIE Student Chapter, IEEE Photonics
Event type: Seminar

Abstract: 

Advances in computational electrodynamics have the potential to enable fundamentally new kinds of designs in nanophotonic devices which are based principally on complex, non-analytical wave-interference effects. Powerful, flexible, open-source software tools have now been made available for use in large-scale, parallel computations to model the interaction of light with practically any kind of material in any arbitrary geometry. These recent developments in computational capability make possible the investigation of various emergent structures and physical phenomena that were previously beyond the reach of pencil-and-paper analytical methods as well as less versatile and even less accessible commercial software tools. Here, I demonstrate how such advances in finitedifference time-domain (FDTD) methods for computational electromagnetism via an open-source software package known as MEEP can lead to entirely new designs for light trapping in nanostructured thin-film silicon solar cells as well as light extraction from nanostructured organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). 

In the last part of this seminar, I will provide a live demonstration of launching MEEP simulations on an ondemand high-performance computing (HPC) cluster in the cloud through our startup, Simpetus. Simpetus provides a holistic solution to the three main challenges of using simulations for research and development: 1) no software licenses or installation, 2) no hardware acquisition or maintenance and 3) technical support from the experts. The mission of Simpetus is to propel computational simulations to the forefront of photonics research and development.

Biography of Speaker

Ardavan Oskooi is the Founder and CEO of Simpetus, a San Francisco-based startup offering an on-demand photonics simulation platform in the cloud with a mission to propel computational simulations to the forefront of photonics research and development. Ardavan received his Sc.D. from MIT where he worked with Professors Steven G. Johnson and John D. Joannopoulos (thesis: Computation & Design for Nanophotonics) to develop MEEP (ab-initio.mit.edu/meep). Ardavan has published 13 first-author articles in peer-reviewed journals and a book "Advances in FDTD Computational Electrodynamics: Photonics and Nanotechnology" with Professors Allen Taflove of Northwestern University and Steven G. Johnson. He has a masters in Computation for Design and Optimization from MIT and completed his undergraduate studies, with honors, in Engineering Science at the University of Toronto. Prior to launching Simpetus, Ardavan worked with Professors Susumu Noda at Kyoto University and Stephen R. Forrest at the University of Michigan on leveraging MEEP to push the frontier of optoelectronic device design.