A hybrid Maxwell solver for nanophotonics simulations
Description
Recent years have seen a reawakened interest in simplified solution schemes for nanophotonic scatterers, as they allow for significantly faster and more efficient simulations of nanoparticle clusters and arrays when compared to full Maxwell solvers. Examples are the transition or T-matrices, which expand the incoming and scattered electromagnetic fields in terms of spherical multipoles, or numerical dipoles, which describe the scatterers’ response through a collection of electric and magnetic dipoles coupled together through a generalized polarizability matrix, or P-matrix in short. In order to obtain the T- and P-matrices, one has to employ a computational Maxwell solver. Here we suggest a hybrid Maxwell solver scheme that combines computational Maxwell solvers with T- and P-matrices under a common roof. For each scatterer the simulation scheme can be chosen in an interchangeable manner, and the different solvers interact with each other through solver-independent electromagnetic fields. Our approach is expected to be beneficial for fast simulations and prototyping, where in the testing stage a fast solver is used and in the production stage one can switch to any other Maxwell solver by simply changing a few lines of code. We have implemented a hybrid Maxwell solver into our nanobem toolbox, which is based on a Galerkin implementation of the boundary element method.