Meep is a free software for Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) simulation, used for simulating electromagnetic systems.
Some of the key features of Meep FDTD are:
- Free software under the GNU GPL.
- Simulations in 1D, 2D, 3D, and cylindrical coordinates.
- Distributed memory parallelism on any system that supports the MPI standard.
- Portable to any Unix-like system (GNU/Linux is fine).
- Dispersive (including loss/gain) and nonlinear (Kerr) materials.
- PML absorbing boundaries and/or perfect conductor and/or Bloch-periodic boundary conditions.
- Exploitation of symmetries to reduce the computation size - even/odd mirror symmetries and 90�/180� rotations.
- Complete scriptability - either via a Scheme scripting front-end (as in libctl and MPB), or callable as a C++ library.
- Field output in the HDF5 standard scientific data format, supported by many visualization tools.
- Arbitrary material and source distributions.
- Field analyses including flux spectra, frequency extraction, and energy integrals; completely programmable.
- Multi-parameter optimization, root-finding, integration, etcetera (via libctl).
Meep FDTD uses time-domain electromagnetic simulations to take Maxwell's equations and evolve them over time within some finite computational region. This essentially performs a numerical experiment and can calculate a wide variety of useful quantities.
The major applications of Meep FDTD are:
- Transmission and reflection spectra - by Fourier-transforming the response to a short pulse, a single simulation can yield the scattering amplitudes over a wide spectrum of frequencies.
- Resonant modes and frequencies - by analyzing the response of the system to a short pulse, one can extract the frequencies, decay rates, and field patterns of the harmonic modes of a system (including waveguide and cavity modes, and including losses).
- Field patterns (e.g. Green's functions) in response to an arbitrary source, typically a CW (fixed) input.
Using the results obtained from these simulations, many other things can be computed, such as the local density of states (from the trace of the Green's function). The scriptable interface of Meep FDTD makes it possible to combine many sorts of computations (along with multi-parameter optimization, etcetera) in sequence or in parallel.
In summary, Meep FDTD is a highly flexible and feature-rich software for electromagnetic simulations, with an impressive array of tools for analyzing and interpreting simulation results. It is a great tool for researchers, engineers, and students working on electromagnetic systems.
Version 1.1.1: N/A