philsol

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 elegance and sophistication out of the window and replaces them with brute force.

This is a fully vectorial finite-difference waveguide mode solver and a direct Python implementation 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: The original paper by Zhu and Brown is in Gaussian rather than SI units. To correct this, use the conversion table here.

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

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

• Solves vector Maxwell (Helmholtz) equations in 2-D for arbitrary refractive-index profiles.
• Returns the x and y components of the 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). These libraries can be fiddly to set up but are very heavily featured, including some limited GPU support.
• Additional field components Ez, Hx, Hy, Hz can be calculated from the construct module.
• Perfect electric conductor, periodic and absorbing boundary conditions.

• 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 .bmp 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 Pillow's anti-aliasing capabilities.

I wrote this code a while ago during 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.