Deep learning enabled inverse design in nanophotonics

Deep learning has become the dominant approach in artificial intelligence to solve complex data-driven problems. Originally applied almost exclusively in computer-science areas such as image analysis and nature language processing, deep learning has rapidly entered a wide variety of scientific fields including physics, chemistry and material science. Very recently, deep neural networks have been introduced in the field of nanophotonics as a powerful way of obtaining the nonlinear mapping between the topology and composition of arbitrary nanophotonic structures and their associated functional properties. In this paper, we have discussed the recent progress in the application of deep learning to the inverse design of nanophotonic devices, mainly focusing on the three existing learning paradigms of supervised-, unsupervised-, and reinforcement learning. Deep learning forward modelling i.e. how artificial intelligence learns how to solve Maxwell’s equations, is also discussed, along with an outlook of this rapidly evolving research area.