Advances in Inverse Design for Wave Propagation Problems

Organizers of this minisymposium are

Computational inverse design has enabled the discovery of high-performance structures across many areas of physics and engineering for more than three decades, and has recently experienced a surge of interest within both academia and industry. This has led to substantial advances in method development and an expansion of the areas of application. Despite these advances, there are still a significant number of unresolved issues related to both fundamental method development and applications. Issues such as avoiding poor-quality local optima for challenging design problems, slow convergence, accounting for fabrication constraints, the exploration of deep learning as a tool for inverse design and the efficient modelling of largescale wave-propagation problems, to name a subset.

It is well known, that important and useful similarities exist for wave propagation problems across different areas of physics. The same is true for inverse design methods tailored for wave propagation problems. Hence, a brilliant idea and associated method developed for inverse design in acoustics may be applicable in photonics and vice versa. This mini-symposium seeks to bring together leading researchers in the field of inverse design for wave propagation problems within all areas of physics, in order to facilitate the sharing of ideas across the (seemingly) strict partitions between different areas of physics. Hereby advancing the field and limiting efforts wasted reinventing spoons.

Put succinctly, the mini-symposium focusses on recent advances in research on inverse design methods for wave propagation problems, not limited to any particular physics.