Slow light performance enhancement of Bragg slot photonic crystal waveguide with particle swarm optimization algorithm

Recently, majority of current research in the field of designing Phonic Crystal Waveguides (PCW) focus in extracting the relations between output slow light properties of PCW and structural parameters through a huge number of tedious non-systematic simulations in order to introduce better designs. This paper proposes a novel systematic approach which can be considered as a shortcut to alleviate the difficulties and human involvements in designing PCWs. In the proposed method, the problem of PCW design is first formulated as an optimization problem. Then, an optimizer is employed in order to automatically find the optimum design for the formulated PCWs. Meanwhile, different constraints are also considered during optimization with the purpose of applying physical limitations to the final optimum structure. As a case study, the structure of a Bragg-like Corrugation Slotted PCWs (BCSPCW) is optimized by using the proposed method. One of the most computationally powerful techniques in Computational Intelligence (Cl) called Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is employed as an optimizer to automatically find the optimum structure for BCSPCW. The optimization process is done by considering five constraints to guarantee the feasibility of the final optimized structures and avoid band mixing. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to find an optimum structure for BCSPCW with 172% and 100% substantial improvements in the bandwidth and Normalized Delay-Bandwidth Product (NDBP) respectively compared to the best current structure in the literature. Moreover, there is a time domain analysis at the end of the paper which verifies the performance of the optimized structure and proves that this structure has low distortion and attenuation simultaneously. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.