Surface roughness simulation in topologically complex optical metadevices and metasystems

Abstract

Optical metadevices are commonly simulated using ideal structures. These perfect geometries are useful for finding significant features of their optical response. In practice, fabrication of such metadevices often results in non-ideal rough structures. Surface roughness is relatively difficult to implement for non-parametrically generated metadevice geometries. We present a method of simulating the effects of surface roughness on the optical response of metastructures using open source Python packages to generate rough importable meshes. The optical response is then simulated using a FEM solver. By simulating many structures with identical roughness statistics, we demonstrate inhomogeneous broadening in the average response.