相关论文: Inverse design of lightweight broadband reflector …
Highly ambitious initiatives aspire to propel a miniature spacecraft to a neighboring star within a human generation, leveraging the radiation pressure of lasers for propulsion. One of the main challenges to achieving this enormous feat is…
Lightsails are a highly promising spacecraft concept that has attracted interest in recent years due to its potential to travel at near-relativistic speeds. Such speeds, which current conventional crafts cannot reach, offer tantalizing…
Lightsails are promising spacecraft that can traverse interstellar distances within decades via radiation-pressure propulsion from high-power lasers. The envisioned missions crucially rely on the sail being confined within the propelling…
Lightsail spacecraft, propelled to relativistic velocities via photon pressure using high power density laser radiation, offer a potentially new route to space exploration within and beyond the solar system, extending to interstellar…
Controlling the flow of broadband electromagnetic energy at the nanoscale remains a critical challenge in optoelectronics. Surface plasmon polaritons (or plasmons) provide subwavelength localization of light, but are affected by significant…
Achieving laser-driven, reflective, relativistic light sails would represent a tremendous breakthrough for humankind, allowing us to advance our understanding of the solar system and deep space far beyond what we know from space probes,…
The Breakthrough Starshot Initiative aims to send a gram-scale probe to Proxima Centuri B using a laser-accelerated lightsail traveling at relativistic speeds. Thermal management is a key lightsail design objective because of the intense…
Lightsails are a promising spacecraft concept that can reach relativistic speeds via propulsion by laser light, allowing travel to nearby stars within a human lifetime. The success of a lightsail mission requires that any motion in the…
Nanophotonics has emerged as a powerful tool for manipulating light on chips. Almost all of today's devices, however, have been designed using slow and ineffective brute-force search methods, leading in many cases to limited device…
The Starshot lightsail project aims to build an ultralight spacecraft ("nanocraft") that can reach Proxima Centauri b in approximately 20 years, requiring propulsion with a relativistic velocity of ~60 000 km/s. The spacecraft's…
The Starshot Breakthrough Initiative aims to send one-gram microchip probes to Alpha Centauri within 20 years, using gram-scale lightsails propelled by laser-based radiation pressure, reaching velocities nearing a fifth of light speed. This…
3D additive manufacturing enables the fabrication of nanophotonic structures with subwavelength features that control light across macroscopic scales. Gradient-based optimization offers an efficient approach to design these complex and…
We introduce a new method for inverse design of nanophotonic devices which guarantees that resulting designs satisfy strict length scale constraints - including minimum width and spacing constraints required by commercial semiconductor…
By co-designing a meta-optical front end in conjunction with an image-processing back end, we demonstrate noise sensitivity and compactness substantially superior to either an optics-only or a computation-only approach, illustrated by two…
Laser propulsion has been proposed for relativistic interstellar flights, but it faces the significant challenge of requiring extremely powerful laser radiation due to the inherently low momentum transfer between the beam and the sail. The…
On-chip photonic networks have the potential to transmit and route information more efficiently than electronic circuits. Recently, a number of silicon-based optical devices including modulators, buffers, and wavelength converts have been…
A spacecraft pushed by radiation has the major advantage that the power source is not included in the accelerated mass, making it the preferred technique for reaching relativistic speeds. There are two main technical challenges. First, to…
Ultrathin lightsails propelled by laser radiation pressure to relativistic speeds are currently the most promising route for flyby-based exoplanet exploration. However, there has been a notable lack of experimental characterization of key…
A major difficulty in applying computational design methods to nanophotonic devices is ensuring that the resulting designs are fabricable. Here, we describe a general inverse design algorithm for nanophotonic devices that directly…
The transverse radiation pressure force and acceleration is compared for two parametrically optimized designs: prismatic and two-pillar metasurface gratings. The numerical results were cross-verified with both Maxwell stress tensor and…