Metalenses have gained significant attention and have been widely utilized in optical systems for focusing and imaging, owing to their lightweight, high-integration, and exceptional-flexibility capabilities. Traditional design methods neglect the coupling effect between adjacent meta-atoms, thus harming the practical performance of meta-devices. The existing physical/data-driven optimization algorithms can solve the above problems, but bring significant time costs or require a large number of data-sets. Here, we propose a physics-data-driven method employing an “intelligent optimizer” that enables us to adaptively modify the sizes of the meta-atom according to the sizes of its surrounding ones. The implementation of such a scheme effectively mitigates the undesired impact of local lattice coupling, and the proposed network model works well on thousands of data-sets with a validation loss of 3×10^?3. Based on the “intelligent optimizer”, a 1-cm-diameter metalens is designed within 3 hours, and the experimental results show that the 1-mm-diameter metalens has a relative focusing efficiency of 93.4% (compared to the ideal focusing efficiency) and a Strehl ratio of 0.94. Compared to previous inverse design method, our method significantly boosts designing efficiency with five orders of magnitude reduction in time. More generally, it may set a new paradigm for devising large-aperture meta-devices.

Integrated circuit (IC) industry has fully considered the fact that the Moore’s Law is slowing down or ending. Alternative solutions are highly and urgently desired to break the physical size limits in the More-than-Moore era. Integrated silicon photonics technology exhibits distinguished potential to achieve faster operation speed, less power dissipation, and lower cost in IC industry, because their COMS compatibility, fast response, and high monolithic integration capability. Particularly, compared with other on-chip resonators (e.g. microrings, 2D photonic crystal cavities) silicon-on-insulator (SOI)-based photonic crystal nanobeam cavity (PCNC) has emerged as a promising platform for on-chip integration, due to their attractive properties of ultra-high Q/V, ultra-compact footprints and convenient integration with silicon bus-waveguides. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review on recent progress of on-chip PCNC devices for lasing, modulation, switching/filting and label-free sensing, etc.