Systems and methods for designing optical devices having mode selective facets

A method of making an optical device comprising an optical cavity, the method comprising:

• defining an initial structure for each of one or more optical interfaces of the optical device, each initial structure being defined using a plurality of voxels in a computational model, at least some of the voxels having a dimension smaller than an operative wavelength of the optical device, the initial structure of a first of the optical interfaces supporting a plurality of optical modes in the optical cavity at the operative wavelength;
• defining a loss function within a computational simulation space encompassing the optical device, the loss function corresponding to an electromagnetic field having the operative wavelength resulting from an interaction between an input electromagnetic field at the operative wavelength and the one or more optical interfaces of the optical device;
• determining values for one or more structural parameters corresponding to a structure of the one or more optical interfaces by solving Maxwell's equations so that a loss determined according to the loss function is within a target loss threshold;
• defining a final structure of the one or more optical interfaces based on the values for the one or more structural parameters, the optical cavity according to the final structure preferentially supporting a subset of the plurality of the optical modes at the operative wavelength;
• and
• making the optical device according to the final structure.