Spontaneous emergence of periodic patterns in a biologically inspired simulation of photonic structures.

We simulate an evolutionary process in the lab for designing a novel high confinement photonic structure, starting with a set of completely random patterns, with no insight on the initial geometrical pattern. We show a spontaneous emergence of periodical patterns as well as previously unseen high confinement subwavelength bowtie regions. The evolved structure has a Q of 300 and an ultrasmall modal volume of 0.112 (lambda/2n)3. The emergence of the periodic patterns in the structure indicates that periodicity is a principal condition for effective control of the distribution of light.