Computational nanophotonics is one of the central tools of the science of light and photonic device engineering. It plays a crucial role in enabling optical technologies ranging from bio-sensing to quantum information processing. Up to the present, a plethora of various methods and commercial software founded on conventional computational electromagnetics methods have been developed. But this is about to change. After a brief review of previous work based on the innovative methods of transformation optics, focus will be put on new approaches built on a multiphysics computational environment that gives tighter integration between different phenomena involved in light-matter interaction and offers a more broad range of new modeling opportunities. For example, numerical modeling of gain-assisted metamaterials and the use of the experiment-fitted numerical models of gain media will be discussed. The quality of the results is greatly improved by incorporating prior background knowledge of quantum physics of the system into the model. Another example is the computationally non-trivial analysis of second harmonic generation in optical metamagnetics built on a hydrodynamic model of an electron gas. Finally, my vision for the inevitable evolution of computational nanophotonics into computational quantum nanophotonics will be shown. In this perspective, several specific research aims for future pursuit will be outlined.

Alex Kildishev is currently an Associate Research Professor with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue. He has had a number of breakthrough results on negative refractive index metamaterials, optical artificial magnetic structures, loss compensation in metamaterials, plasmonic nanolasers, optical metasurfaces, as well as the theory and numerical models of optical cloaks, and hyperlenses. His publications (current h-factor WEB of Science 33, Google Scholar 39) include 5 book chapters, more than 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals, with more than 4000 citations. He has participated in more than 90 invited seminar talks and conferences presentations. He is a co-inventor of 10 issued and pending patents (4 US patents), and a co-author of 7 software online simulation tools. The impact of his work is also illustrated by nanoHUB.org online resource, where a set of modeling tools for nanophotonics developed by his group has served more than 1,300 users worldwide.

Birck Nanotechnology Center, Discovery Park

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Alexander V. Kildishev (2014), "Ongoing Transformation of Computational Nanophotonics," https://nanohub.org/resources/21007.

  BibTex | EndNote

1. Computational Nano-photonics
2. light-matter interaction
3. metamaterials
4. nanophotonics
5. NCN Group - Photonics