Optimization under uncertainty for the Helmholtz equation with application to photonic nanojets configuration

Photonic nanojets (PNJs) have promising applications as optical probes in superresolution optical microscopy, Raman microscopy, as well as fluorescence microscopy. In this work, we consider optimal design of PNJs using a heterogeneous lens refractive index with a fixed lens geometry and uniform plane wave illumination. In particular, we consider the presence of manufacturing error of heterogeneous lens, and propose a computational framework of Optimization Under Uncertainty (OUU) for robust optimal design of PNJ. We formulate a risk-averse stochastic optimization problem with the objective to minimize both the mean and the variance of a target function, which is constrained by the Helmholtz equation that governs the 2D transverse electric (2D TE) electromagnetic field in a neighborhood of the lens. The design variable is taken as a spatially-varying field variable, where we use a finite element method for its discretization, impose a total variation penalty to promote its sparsity, and employ an adjoint-based BFGS method to solve the resulting high-dimensional optimization problem. We demonstrate that our proposed OUU computational framework can achieve more robust optimal design than a
deterministic optimization scheme to significantly mitigate the impact of manufacturing uncertainty.