Inverse Designed, Densely Integrated Classical and Quantum Photonics.

Photonics - manipulation of flow of light on a chip - has many exciting applications, including new computing and communication platforms that are faster, more compact and more energy efficient, and a variety of sensors for medicine, autonomous vehicles, and the environment. Despite a great progress in photonics over the past few decades, photonic systems are nowhere near the level of integration and complexity comparable to those of electronic circuits, which prevents use of photonics in many applications. This lag in integration scale is in large part a result of how photonics is traditionally designed: by combining building blocks from a limited library of known designs, and by manual tuning of few parameters. Unfortunately, the resulting photonic circuits are often bulky, inefficient, and very sensitive to errors in manufacturing and the environment.