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.
- 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
- Perfect electric conductor, periodic and absorbing boundary conditions.
Geometry building
- The quickest way of importing geometry is with a bitmap image
- See examples/example_image.py and examples/Hollow_Core_Fibre.ipynb for examples loading .bpm images
- See examples/example_build.py for an example in building geometry using PIL/Pillow
- See examples/Boundary Interpolation Example.ipynb for an attempt to handle curved boundaries with pillows anti-aliasing capabilities
Final Note
I wrote this code a while ago for my PhD but sometimes I get nostalgic about photonics so if you are doing anything cool with philsol I would love to know about it.