MIT Photonic Bands

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The MIT Photonic-Bands (MPB) package is a free program for computing the band structures (dispersion relations) and electromagnetic modes of periodic dielectric structures, on both serial and parallel computers. It was developed by Steven G. Johnson at MIT along with the Joannopoulos Ab Initio Physics group.

This program computes definite-frequency eigenstates (harmonic modes) of Maxwell's equations in periodic dielectric structures for arbitrary wavevectors, using fully-vectorial and three-dimensional methods. It is especially designed for the study of photonic crystals (a.k.a. photonic band-gap materials), but is also applicable to many other problems in optics, such as waveguides and resonator systems. (For example, it can solve for the modes of waveguides with arbitrary cross-sections.)

Contents

MPB download

MIT Photonic Bands
Download
Release notes
MPB manual
Introduction
Installation
User Tutorial
Data Analysis Tutorial
User Reference
Developer Information
Acknowledgements
License and Copyright

You can download the full source code (in ANSI C) for MPB under the free GPL license. The [[MPB Installation|installation] section of the manual describes how to install it; mainly, this consists of downloading and installing various prerequisites if you do not have them already.

New! Version 1.4.2

The MPB release notes describe what is new in each version; the current version of MPB is 1.4.2.

Documentation

The MPB manual is readable online. Note especially the tutorial section of the manual, to get a flavor of what it is like to use the program. You may be also interested in the libctl manual, which describes a Guile/Scheme-based scripting library that we build our interface on top of, and also a collection of Guile and Scheme links.

We have published a paper (available online) on the computational methods underlying MPB:

Steven G. Johnson and J. D. Joannopoulos, "Block-iterative frequency-domain methods for Maxwell's equations in a planewave basis," Optics Express 8, no. 3, 173-190 (2001).

See also our free GPL license#Referencing|referencing suggestions for how to cite MPB in your work.

Mailing Lists

The MPB mailing lists (and their archives) are another source of information about MPB.

Subscribe to the (read-only) mpb-announce mailing list to receive an email when MIT Photonic-Bands is updated in the future. Subscribe to the (unmoderated) mpb-discuss mailing list for discussion of questions and ideas about using the MIT Photonic-Bands package. Announcements are not always sent to mpb-discuss; you should subscribe to mpb-announce for that. Archives of mpb-discuss are available online. (You can also read & post the list via the gmane.comp.science.photonic-bands newsgroup from Gmane).

Features

Some of the more noteworthy features of the MIT Photonic-Bands package are:

  • Fully-vectorial, three-dimensional calculation. Iterative eigensolver techniques are employed to make large, three-dimensional calculations possible. (Can handle 2D and 1D problems too, of course.)
  • Direct, frequency-domain eigensolver (as opposed to indirect methods, e.g. time-domain). For one thing, this means that you get both eigenvalues (frequencies) and eigenstates (electromagnetic modes) at the same time. (See also a comparison of time-domain and frequency-domain techniques in the MPB manual.)
  • Targeted eigensolver. Normally, iterative eigensolvers provide you with the states (optical bands/modes) with the lowest few frequencies. Our software can alternatively compute the modes whose frequencies are closest to a specified target frequency. This greatly reduces the number of bands that must be computed in guided or resonant mode calculations.
  • Flexible, scriptable user interface based upon the GNU Guile extension & scripting language.
  • Support for arbitrary, anisotropic dielectric structures (including gyrotropic/magneto-optic materials) and non-orthogonal unit cells.
  • Field output in HDF format for input into many popular graphing and visualization tools.
  • Portable to most any Unix-like operating system; tested under Linux, AIX, IRIX, and Tru64 (née Digital) Unix. See also the installation section of the manual.
  • Support for parallel machines with MPI. (Tested on an SGI Origin2000 and on an SMP Linux machine with MPICH.)
  • Free software under the GNU General Public License. (See also the MPB License and Copyright section of the manual.)

To give you some feel for how long these calculations take, let us consider one typical data point. For the 3d band-structure of a diamond lattice of dielectric spheres in air, computing the lowest 10 bands on a 16×16×16 grid at 31 k-points, MPB 1.0 took 2 minutes on a 550MHz Pentium-III under Linux with the ATLAS optimized BLAS library. (Thus, at each k-point, MPB was minimizing a function with 81920 degrees of freedom in 4 seconds on average.)

Acknowledgements

Many people and groups have contributed to the development of this software, both directly and indirectly. Please see the acknowledgements section of the manual for those to whom we feel especially grateful.

Contact Info

If you have questions or problems regarding MIT Photonic-Bands, you are encouraged look at the mailing lists and the mpb-discuss archives as your first resort.

For professional consulting support of the MIT Photonic-Bands package, and photonic band-gap applications in general, contact Prof. John D. Joannopoulos of MIT (phone: (617) 253-4806, fax: (617) 253-2562).

Alternatively, you may directly contact Steven G. Johnson at stevenj@alum.mit.edu.

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