Dr. Raphaël Pestourie of MIT Mathematics

In photonics, fabrication technologies now enable us to build devices, e.g. metasurfaces, that have aperiodic patterns at the scale of the wavelength and diameters of thousands of wavelengths, which present an unprecedented opportunity to shape light with complex objectives. However, these devices are very challenging to simulate and even harder to optimize. This talk will present ways to harness the full computational power of modern large-scale optimization in order to design metasurfaces by exploiting domain-decomposition approximations and surrogate models. We will also present recent experimental results of large-area lenses that are achromatic for several wavelengths across the visible. Finally, we will present an efficient way to simulate and optimize collimators and concentrators for incoherent light using reciprocal simulations.

Biography:

Dr. Raphaël Pestouri has been a postdoctoral associate at MIT Mathematics funded by IBM since 2020. His current research leverages data and partial differential equations in efficient simulation and optimization to achieve high-performance at low cost. Originally from France, Raphaël earned a dual degree between ESSEC Business School and École Centrale Paris. He earned a Master’s of research in Nanosciences at Université Paris Saclay. He conducted his master’s research on metamaterials at UC Berkeley in the lab of Prof. Xiang Zhang. He earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Harvard University as a fellow from Fulbright France. His Ph.D. research was about inverse design for metasurfaces, and he was co-advised between Federico Capasso and Steven Johnson at MIT.