Free Computational Software

We use a lot of different free/open-source computational software packages in our work, including several developed in our group:

• MIT Photonic-Bands (MPB): software for computing band structures and electromagnetic modes of periodic dielectric structures.
• Meep: finite-difference time-domain simulations
• Harminv: a program to extract modal frequencies and decay constants from time-series data. We often use this to extract eigenfrequencies of electromagnetic modes (including leaky modes) from FDTD simulations.
• libctl: a user-interface library for scientific software based on the GNU Guile extension/scripting language; used in MPB.
• h5utils: free utilities for visualizing HDF5 files, including h5topng (produces PNG images from data slices), h5totxt (produces ascii text for spreadsheet import from data slices), and h5read.oct (a plug-in for GNU Octave, a Matlab-like program, allowing it to import data from HDF5 files.
• The Fastest Fourier Transform in the West: a software package co-developed by a member of our group (we use FFTs heavily).
• NLopt: nonlinear optimization library implementing many different optimization algorithms
• Cubature code for adaptive multidimensional integration of vector-valued integrands via the Genz-Malik algorithm.
• Faddeeva Package: computes the error functions of complex arguments (via the Faddeeva function).

Free Nanophotonics Software

• Meep: our finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) package
• MPB: our electromagnetic eigenmode solver
• CAMFR: transfer-matrix/RCWA (via eigenmode expansion) package
• S4: transfer-matrix/RCWA (via Fourier-basis eigenmode expansion) package
• SMTP, an integral-equation solver for waveguides
• grcwa: RCWA scattering-matrix software, autodifferentiable with autograd
• FMMAX: Fourier Modal Method / RCWA scattering-matrix software, autodifferentiable with JAX

Feel free to email me if you have any other free photonis software to suggest. Please do not suggest shareware, "demo versions" of closed-source programs, etcetera: we're only going to list free-as-in-freedom software, not free-as-in-beer.

Related Links

The following are links to sites that are related to our group or our research:

• MIT and the Physics Department have their own home pages. There is also a page for Condensed Matter Theory.
• We are heavy users of two supercomputing facilities: SDSC and NCSA's Origin2000.
• Currently, there are two national networks of supercomputing groups studying the future of the Internet and remote high performance research. One group is the Alliance and the other is the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI). The Alliance has an on-line magazine "Access" which is a window to the work done in the group.
• Our group works closely with Professor Tomas Arias of Cornell, a former student of Professor Joannopoulos'.
• The main electronic density functional code we use is the DFT++ package.
• A very user-friendly pseudopotential generating package -- fhi98PP
• The Ultimate Collection of Photonic Band Gap Research Links (maintained by Dr. Yurii A. Vlasov)
• Photonic and Acoustic Band-Gap Bibliography (maintained by Dr. Jonathan P. Dowling).