MIT Photonic-Bands

Welcome to the manual for the MIT Photonic-Bands (MPB) package, a program for computing band structures (dispersion relations) of optical systems. Photonic-Bands was developed by Steven G. Johnson of the Joannopoulos Ab Initio Physics Group in the Condensed Matter Theory division of the MIT Physics Department.

Overview

This documentation is divided into the following sections:

• Introduction: The introductory section describes the motivation, history, and high-level structure of this package.
  • Frequency-domain vs. time-domain
  • History

• Installation: How to install and compile Photonic-Bands, including descriptions of and links to software you must first download and install from other sources.
  • Configuring installation paths
  • Fun with Fortran
  • BLAS
  • LAPACK
  • MPI (optional)
  • HDF5
  • FFTW
  • GNU Readline (optional)
  • GNU Guile
  • GNU Autoconf (optional)
  • libctl
  • MIT Photonic-Bands (MPB)

• User Tutorial: In this section, we introduce the use of Photonic-Bands to compute a photonic band structure. A simple tutorial illustrates how the basic features are used to solve for the modes of example structures.
  • The ctl File
  • A first band structure (square lattice of dielectric rods in air)
  • Units
  • A triangular lattice (of rods)
  • Maximizing the first TM gap
  • An anisotropic dielectric (in 2D)
  • Finding a point-defect state
  • Tuning the point-defect state
  • Emacs and ctl files

• Data Analysis Tutorial: Here, we walk through how you might analyze and visualize the results from a couple of typical MPB calculations. Includes some pretty pictures for those who don't like to read.
  • Triangular lattice of rods
    • Control file
    • Dielectric function
    • Band structure and gaps
    • Field patterns
  • Diamond lattice of spheres
    • Control file
    • Note on units for fcc lattices
    • Band structure and gaps
    • Visualizing the fields and dielectric

• User Reference: A compact listing of the various functions and features provided by the user interface.
  • Input variables
  • Predefined variables
  • Output variables
  • Classes (data structures)
    • lattice
    • material-type
    • geometric-object
  • Functions
    • Geometry utilities
    • Coordinate conversions
    • Run functions
    • Band functions
    • Field manipulation
    • Miscellaneous
  • Inversion symmetry
  • Parallel MPB
    • MPB with MPI parallelization
    • Alternative parallelization: mpb-split

• Developer Information: In this section, we outline some of the internal structure and algorithms used in Photonic-Bands, as an aid to outside developers wishing to add new features and bugs.

• Acknowledgments: A project of this size could never be completed without the support of many others, to whom we are very grateful.

• License and Copyright: Photonic-Bands is free software under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL).
  • Also see this section for referencing information.

Feedback

For professional consulting support of the MIT Photonic-Bands package, and photonic band-gap applications in general, contact Prof. John D. Joannopoulos of MIT (phone: (617) 253-4806, fax: (617) 253-2562).

If you have questions or problems regarding MIT Photonic-Bands, you are encouraged to join the mpb-discuss mailing list. This way, you can get help from other users of the software. In addition, this way other users can benefit from your experience by reading the mpb-discuss archives.

Alternatively, you may directly contact Steven G. Johnson at stevenj@alum.mit.edu. Complicated problems may be referred to consulting, above.