Meep Tutorial/Optical forces

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Here we will demonstrate Meep's ability to compute classical forces using the Maxwell stress tensor (MST) as well as the eigenmode source feature which integrates the frequency-domain functionality of our other open-source tool MPB. Our example consists of two identical dielectric waveguides supporting the same mode and separated in space. Due to the symmetry and orientation of the waveguide profile, the two modes can be chosen to be either symmetric or anti-symmetric with respect to a mirror plane between them. As the two waveguides are brought closer and closer together, the individual guided modes interact and give rise to an optical gradient force that is transverse to the waveguide axis (this is to be contrasted with radiation pressure that involves momentum exchange between photons and is longitudinal in nature). An interesting phenomena that occurs is that the force can be tuned to be either attractive or repulsive depending on the relative phase of the two modes which we will demonstrate in this tutorial.

The optical gradient force arises from the evanescent coupling of the modes of two adjacent structures and can be computed using the following analytic expression:

F=-\frac{1}{\omega}\frac{d\omega}{ds}\Bigg\vert_\vec{k}U,

where ω is the eigenmode frequency of the coupled-waveguide system, s is the separation distance between the parallel waveguides, k is the conserved wave vector and U is the total energy of the electromagnetic fields. By convention, negative and positive values correspond to attractive and repulsive forces, respectively. This expression has been shown to be mathematically equivalent to the Maxwell stress tensor method and in this tutorial we will verify this result for the parallel-waveguide example. It is convenient to properly normalize the force to eliminate units and since we know that the total power transmitted through the waveguide is P = vgU / L (vg is the group velocity, L is the waveguide length and U is defined as before), we use the dimensionless quantity force per unit length and power (F / L)(ac / P) (a is an arbitrary unit length and c is the speed of light).

We can therefore compute the optical gradient force in two ways, one indirect and the other direct: 1) in MPB, we compute the eigenmode frequency and group velocity for a mode with a fixed propagating wavevector and then use a finite-difference scheme to evaluate the above expression and 2) in Meep, we compute the force directly using the MST as well as the power transmitted through the waveguide.

First, let us set up the computational cell

 (set-param! resolution 20)
 (define-param nSi 3.45)
 (define Si (make medium (index nSi)))
 (define-param dpml 5.0)
 (define-param sx 20)
 (define-param sy 5)
 (set! geometry-lattice 
     (make lattice (size (+ sx (* 2 dpml)) (+ sy (* 2 dpml)) no-size)))
 (set! pml-layers (list (make pml (thickness dpml))))
 (define-param sw 1.0) ; waveguide width
 (define-param d 1.0)  ; waveguide separation distance
 (set! geometry (list 

(make block (center (* -0.5 (+ d sw)) 0) (size sw sw infinity) (material Si)) (make block (center (* 0.5 (+ d sw)) 0) (size sw sw infinity) (material Si))))

Normalized force per unit length and input power versus waveguide separation of two parallel waveguides.
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