philsol

Modes for the Masses (Massless?)

Fed up with relying on expensive proprietary software for your electromagnetic waveguide research? philsol might just be the package for you. In a world where high performance hardware is cheaper than specialist software, philsol throws elegence and sophistication out of the window and replaces it with brute force.

This is a fully vectorial finite difference waveguide mode solver and a direct Python implimentation of the algorithm found in the paper: 'Full-vectorial finite-difference analysis of microstructured optical fibres', by Zhu and Brown.

Warning: I haven't thoroughly tested so be wary and check the results are sensible...

New Warning: Original paper by Zhu and Brown is in gaussian not S. I. units. To correct use conversion table here.

Installation

• Install using pip with command 'pip install philsol'
• If you can't be bothered, the important part is the function eigenbuild in core.py.

Examples

• Commented example projects can be found in the examples directory.
• To run the examples, first install philsol to your Python environment (see above)

Features

Solver

• Solves vector Maxwell(Helmholtz) equations in 2D for arbitary refractive index profile.
• Return x and y componants of electric field.
• philsol can handle anisotropic refractive indices with diagonal tensor.
• Currently hard coded with conductive boundary.
• Choice of solving routines: the default scipy.sparse solver or Slepc (slepc4py and petsc4py) this libraries can be fiddly to set up but are very heavily featured including some limited GPU support.
• Extra field componants Ez, Hx, Hy, Hz can be calculated from construct module
• Periodic boundary conditions

Geometry building

• The quickest way of importing geometry is with a bitmap image
• See examples/example_image.py for an example in loading .bpm images
• See examples/example_build.py for an example in building geometry using PIL/Pillow

To do

• More intelligent geometry aproximation (e.g pixel interpolation on curved boundaries)
• More boundry condition options Bloch, PML...
• GPU eigensolving