Fabrication-Aware Design of a Hybrid Metasurface-Bragg Mirror for Low-Noise Precision Optics
Abstract
High-reflectivity coatings for precision interferometry must simultaneously minimize optical losses and thermally driven displacement noise. Dielectric Bragg mirrors provide robust high reflectance but rely on thick multilayer coatings, whereas metasurface mirrors provide high reflectance and low noise but are sensitive to fabrication-induced deviations. A fabrication-aware photonic design framework is introduced that combines a resonant single-layer metasurface, an etch-stop layer, an antiresonant spacer, and a reduced Bragg reflector. Fabrication effects, including geometric tolerances and line-edge roughness, are explicitly considered in the optical design. Full-wave electromagnetic simulations are combined with a truncated-Gaussian Monte Carlo analysis to determine the performance distribution under the assumed fabrication conditions. The ideal metasurface design achieves a modeled non-reflected power of 1−R<10−5. After roughness-aware reoptimization, the modeled non-reflected power remains below 1.04·10−4 at 80% fabrication yield. For the cryogenic ETpathfinder gravitational-wave testbed, two Bragg layer pairs reduce the non-reflected power of the complete stack to approximately 6.6 ppm. The estimated thermal displacement-noise amplitude spectral density is 1.97·10−20 m/√(Hz) at 100 Hz. The architecture connects fabrication robustness, optical performance, and thermal-noise reduction within a single design framework.
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BibTeX
@misc{gaedtke2026fabricationaware,
title = {{Fabrication-Aware Design of a Hybrid Metasurface-Bragg Mirror for Low-Noise Precision Optics}},
author = {Mika Gaedtke and Christian Kranhold and Markus Walther and Falk Eilenberger and Stefanie Kroker and Thomas Siefke},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.05001},
eprint = {2609.05001},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05001},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Fabrication-Aware Design of a Hybrid Metasurface-Bragg Mirror for Low-Noise Precision Optics
AU - Mika Gaedtke
AU - Christian Kranhold
AU - Markus Walther
AU - Falk Eilenberger
AU - Stefanie Kroker
AU - Thomas Siefke
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/13
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.05001
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05001
AB - High-reflectivity coatings for precision interferometry must simultaneously minimize optical losses and thermally driven displacement noise. Dielectric Bragg mirrors provide robust high reflectance but rely on thick multilayer coatings, whereas metasurface mirrors provide high reflectance and low noise but are sensitive to fabrication-induced deviations. A fabrication-aware photonic design framework is introduced that combines a resonant single-layer metasurface, an etch-stop layer, an antiresonant spacer, and a reduced Bragg reflector. Fabrication effects, including geometric tolerances and line-edge roughness, are explicitly considered in the optical design. Full-wave electromagnetic simulations are combined with a truncated-Gaussian Monte Carlo analysis to determine the performance distribution under the assumed fabrication conditions. The ideal metasurface design achieves a modeled non-reflected power of 1−R<10^−5. After roughness-aware reoptimization, the modeled non-reflected power remains below 1.04·10^−4 at 80% fabrication yield. For the cryogenic ETpathfinder gravitational-wave testbed, two Bragg layer pairs reduce the non-reflected power of the complete stack to approximately 6.6 ppm. The estimated thermal displacement-noise amplitude spectral density is 1.97·10^−20 m/√(Hz) at 100 Hz. The architecture connects fabrication robustness, optical performance, and thermal-noise reduction within a single design framework.
ER -