Freeform Light Routing in Nearly‐Hyperuniform Slabs: Toward a General‐Purpose Design Platform for Integrated Photonics

ABSTRACT

We present a bottom‐up design strategy for freeform planar photonic interconnects implemented in nearly hyperuniform disordered (HUD) photonic slabs. Rather than starting from a predefined photonic lattice and adapting optical pathways to its geometric constraints, the proposed approach inverts this logic by prescribing the desired optical path first and then constructing the surrounding dielectric environment locally to support guided transport. This pathway‐first strategy enables arbitrarily shaped guiding channels protected by a photonic bandgap, maintaining high transmission through bends and complex geometries without reliance on lattice symmetry directions. Within this unified framework, conventional photonic crystal waveguides emerge naturally as special cases, while genuinely freeform interconnects that are inaccessible within periodic architectures become systematically realizable. Finite‐difference time‐domain simulations demonstrate robust guidance and high transmission within a well‐defined low‐loss spectral window for realistic material platforms. These predictions are validated experimentally through near‐infrared measurements on silicon membrane devices and mm‐scale experiments on 3D‐printed ceramic slabs, which directly confirm low‐loss transmission and field confinement along freeform pathways. Together, these results establish an experimentally grounded design paradigm for disorder‐engineered photonic interconnects, identifying HUD‐based freeform architectures as a flexible and scalable foundation for compact, high‐density integrated photonic circuits beyond the constraints of periodic design.