On the reliability of the collective coordinate method to simulate metasurfaces with correlated disorder used for light management

Abstract

High-index nanodisk metasurfaces with correlated disorder are promising as an anti-reflective metasurface for several optoelectronic devices. However, their computational analysis remains a major challenge since capturing the long-range scattering response of these disordered nanostructures requires a sufficiently large simulation domain, inhibiting simulation studies due to high computational costs. To overcome this challenge, we investigate the collective coordinate method (CCM) to identify smaller and optimal super-cells feasible for computational analysis that still represent the spatial correlation characteristics of the larger system. Our focus lies in determining the reliability of the optical response obtained from such optimized samples compared to ensemble-averaged unoptimized samples and large-scale samples that include long-range information. Our results in the context of solar cells indicate that CCM offers a robust solution across all scatterer parameters and domain sizes to accurately simulate the response of a large-scale system with hyperuniform disorder. Our work unlocks a use of such a reciprocal-space optimization scheme to reliably simulate metasurfaces with tailored disorder.