Meep FDTD 0.10 review

Meep FDTD is a free finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation software package developed at MIT to model electromagnetic system

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 861K Developer: Steven G. Johnson

0

Meep FDTD is a free finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation software package developed at MIT to model electromagnetic systems, along with our MPB eigenmode package.

Here are some key features of "Meep FDTD":
Free software under the GNU GPL.
Simulation in 1d, 2d, 3d, and cylindrical coordinates.
Distributed memory parallelism on any system supporting the MPI standard. Portable to any Unix-like system (GNU/Linux is fine).
Dispersive (including loss/gain) and nonlinear (Kerr) materials.
PML absorbing boundaries and/or perfect conductor and/or Bloch-periodic boundary conditions.
Exploitation of symmetries to reduce the computation size - even/odd mirror symmetries and 90°/180° rotations.
Complete scriptability - either via a Scheme scripting front-end (as in libctl and MPB), or callable as a C++ library.
Field output in the HDF5 standard scientific data format, supported by many visualization tools.
Arbitrary material and source distributions.
Field analyses including flux spectra, frequency extraction, and energy integrals; completely programmable.
Multi-parameter optimization, root-finding, integration, etcetera (via libctl).

Time-domain simulation

A time-domain electromagnetic simulation simply takes Maxwell's equations and evolves them over time within some finite computational region, essentially performing a kind of numerical experiment. This can be used to calculate a wide variety of useful quantities, but major applications include:

Transmission and reflection spectra - by Fourier-transforming the response to a short pulse, a single simulation can yield the scattering amplitudes over a wide spectrum of frequencies.
Resonant modes and frequencies - by analyzing the response of the system to a short pulse, one can extract the frequencies, decay rates, and field patterns of the harmonic modes of a system (including waveguide and cavity modes, and including losses).
Field patterns (e.g. Green's functions) in response to an arbitrary source, archetypically a CW (fixed) input.

Using these results, one can then compute many other things, such as the local density of states (from the trace of the Green's function). Meep's scriptable interface makes it possible to combine many sorts of computations (along with multi-parameter optimization etcetera) in sequence or in parallel.

What's New in This Release:
This release adds a new subpixel averaging scheme, support for second-order nonlinearities, and various bugfixes.