TY - GEN A1 - Hammerschmidt, Martin A1 - Pomplun, Jan A1 - Burger, Sven A1 - Schmidt, Frank T1 - Adaptive sampling strategies for efficient parameter scans in nano-photonic device simulations N2 - Rigorous optical simulations are an important tool in optimizing scattering properties of nano-photonic devices and are used, for example, in solar cell optimization. The finite element method (FEM) yields rigorous, time-harmonic, high accuracy solutions of the full 3D vectorial Maxwell's equations [1] and furthermore allows for great flexibility and accuracy in the geometrical modeling of these often complex shaped 3D nano-structures. A major drawback of frequency domain methods is the limitation of single frequency evaluations. For example the accurate computation of the short circuit current density of an amorphous silicon / micro-crystalline multi-junction thin film solar cell may require the solution of Maxwell's equations for over a hundred different wavelengths if an equidistant sampling strategy is employed. Also in optical metrology, wavelength scans are frequently used to reconstruct unknown geometrical and material properties of optical systems numerically from measured scatterometric data. In our contribution we present several adaptive numerical integration and sampling routines and study their efficiency in the context of the determination of generation rate profiles of solar cells. We show that these strategies lead to a reduction in the computational effort without loss of accuracy. We discuss the employment of tangential information in a Hermite interpolation scheme to achieve similar accuracy on coarser grids. We explore the usability of these strategies for scatterometry and solar cell simulations. T3 - ZIB-Report - 14-20 KW - finite element method KW - optical simulations KW - adaptive sampling KW - optical metrology KW - parameter scans KW - solar cells Y1 - 2014 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-50395 SN - 1438-0064 ER -