DDSNet: Dual-domain Symmetry-aware Network for PCSEL Property Prediction

Abstract

Efficient exploration of the photonic crystal (PhC) lattice design space is essential for developing photonic crystal surface-emitting lasers. While coupled-wave theory (CWT) provides an effective physical framework, its computational cost remains prohibitive for large-scale exploration, driving the demand for neural surrogates. However, existing AI models underexploit two key factors of PhC unit-cell dielectric patterns indicated by CWT: spectral components and asymmetric structures, which largely govern devices' physical properties. This mismatch weakens surrogate accuracy and screening reliability, especially in structure-sensitive regions. To address this, we propose the Dual-Domain Symmetry-Aware Network (DDSNet). It integrates translation-equivariant spectral filtering with a symmetry-induced structural prior. The spectral filtering injects a spectral inductive bias into vision model while preserving translation equivariance on lattices. Meanwhile, the structural prior decomposes lattice features into irreducible representation-associated, symmetry-resolved components and processes them in separate branches. Experiments demonstrate that DDSNet significantly outperforms existing AI baselines in property prediction and high-throughput screening, exhibiting superior reliability in structure-sensitive regions. Crucially, component masking analyses reveal that the network successfully learns property-specific dependencies aligned with physical priors. These results indicate that DDSNet effectively captures physically meaningful structure-property relationships, establishing a highly reliable neural surrogate for PhC design space exploration.