Reliability-Aware Bayesian Optimization of 1310 nm PCSELs with FDTD Verification

Near 1310 nm photonic-crystal surface-emitting lasers (PCSELs) are attractive narrow-beam sources for optical communication and sensing, but their final design refinement is costly. Small geometry changes simultaneously shift the band-edge resonance, cavity leakage, far-field divergence, and the numerical stability of a high-Q decay fit, while every full-wave trial requires a time-domain simulation. We couple a commercial finite-difference time-domain solver to a reliability-aware Bayesian optimization (BO) loop over eight local design variables. Each completed simulation updates the surrogate used to choose the next geometry. Candidate ranking combines wavelength and beam-quality requirements with a reliability-adjusted metric Q_{eff} derived from the solver-reported relative fit-error estimate dQ/Q. Across three 80-evaluation runs from the same reference model, BO produced 5--15 candidates per run that passed the joint filter. Designs reconstructed from fresh model copies retained Q_{eff}=4.33\times10^6--7.76\times10^6, a 60--108-fold increase over the baseline metric, at 1308.23--1310.90 nm with approximately 0.84^{\circ} divergence. Under equal budgets, BO gave the highest mean strict-filter yield (9.0 candidates), compared with differential evolution (7.0) and Latin-hypercube sampling (1.5), although the controls occasionally matched the peak Q_{eff}. Field maps, resonance spectra, and local perturbations further identify an index-related wavelength handle and a hole-size-related leakage handle. The resulting FDTD budget produces a pool of wavelength-compatible, narrow-beam, and reproducible high-Q PCSEL candidates without trusting a single optimistic decay fit.