Fig. 5. Comparison of forward runtime versus complexity of the nanoparticle.

The simulation becomes infeasible to run many times for large particles, while the NN’s time increases much more slowly. Conceptually, this is logical as the NN is using pure matrix multiplication—and the matrices do not get much bigger—while the simulation must approximate higher and higher orders. The scale is log-log. The simulation was fit with a quadratic fit, while the NN was a linear fit. See the Supplementary Materials for more details and inverse design speed comparison.