Evolutionary design of two-dimensional material Fabry–Perot structures for enhanced second harmonic generation

The integration of two-dimensional (2D) materials with resonant photonic structures is seen as a promising direction for enhancing its nonlinear optical response. The design of such heterogeneous resonant structures has often relied on multi-parameter sweeps to determine the optimized dimensions of resonant optical structure that results in good resonance characteristics, often in the absence of the 2D material. Such an approach is computationally intensive and may not necessarily result in efficient generation or collection of nonlinear signals from the designed structure. Here, we report hybrid-genetic optimization (HGA) based design and experimental demonstration of second harmonic generation (SHG) enhancement from Fabry–Perot structures of single and double multilayer gallium selenide (GaSe) flakes with bottom silicon dioxide, and index matched polymethyl methacrylate spacer/encapsulation layers. HGA technique utilized here speeds up the multilayer cavity design by 8.8 and 89-times for the single and double GaSe structures when compared to the full parameter-sweep, with measured SHG enhancement of 128- and 400-times, respectively, when compared to a reference sample composed of GaSe layer of optimized thickness on 300 nm silicon dioxide layer. SHG conversion efficiencies obtained from the HGA structures are 1–2 orders of magnitude higher than previous reports on 2D material integrated resonant metasurfaces or Bragg cavities.