A New Model for Efficient Simulation of Spatially Incoherent Light Using the Wiener Chaos Expansion Method

We demonstrate a new and efficient technique for modeling and simulation of spatially incoherent sources, using the Wiener chaos expansion (WCE) method. By implementing this new model, we show that a practical-size photonic structure with a spatially incoherent input source can be analyzed more than two orders of magnitude faster compared to the conventional models without sacrificing the accuracy. Many biological and environmental sensing applications demand spectral analysis of diffuse (i.e., spatially incoherent) light [1]. Since the diffuse optical signals are usually very faint and have a wide angular extent, sensing them using conventional spectrometers is not efficient. To improve the sensitivity of the optical spectrometers for diffuse light spectroscopy, a new class of spectrometers called multimodal multiplex spectrometers (MMSs), have been recently proposed and implemented using photonic crystals (PCs) [2] and volume holograms [3]. † Ali Adibi is the corresponding author. His email address is [email protected].