The Scalable Library for Eigenvalue Problem Computations (SLEPc) is a software library for computing a few eigenvalues and associated eigenvectors of a large sparse matrix or matrix pencil. It has been developed on top of PETScand enforces the same programming paradigm.The emphasis of the software is on methods and techniques appropriate for problems in which the associated matrices are sparse, for example, those arising after the discretization of partial differential equations. Therefore, most of the methods offered by the library are projection methods such as Arnoldi or Lanczos, or other methods with similar properties. SLEPc provides basic methods as well as more sophisticated algorithms. It also provides built-in support for spectral transformations such as the shift-and-invert technique. SLEPc is a general library in the sense that it covers standard and generalized eigenvalue problems, both Hermitian and non-Hermitian, with either real or complex arithmetic.SLEPc can be easily applied to real world problems. To illustrate this, several case studies arising from real applications are presented and solved with SLEPc with little programming effort. The addressed problems include a matrix-free standard problem, a complex generalized problem, and a singular value decomposition. The implemented codes exhibit good properties regarding flexibility as well as parallel performance.

Gyrokinetic simulations of drift waves in low-magnetic-shear stellarators reveal that simulation domains comprised of multiple turns can be required to properly resolve critical mode structures important in saturation dynamics. Marginally stable eigenmodes important in saturation of ion temperature gradient modes and trapped electron modes in the Helically Symmetric Experiment (HSX) stellarator are observed to have two scales, with the envelope scale determined by the properties of the local magnetic shear and an inner scale determined by the interplay between the local shear and magnetic field-line curvature. Properly resolving these modes removes spurious growth rates that arise for extended modes in zero-magnetic-shear approximations, enabling use of a zero-magnetic-shear technique with smaller simulation domains and attendant cost savings. Analysis of subdominant modes in trapped electron mode (TEM)-driven turbulence reveals that the extended marginally stable modes play an important role in the nonlinear dynamics, and suggests that the properties induced by low magnetic shear may be exploited to provide another route for turbulence saturation.

Novel memory-efficient Arnoldi algorithms for solving matrix polynomial eigenvalue problems are presented. More specifically, we consider the case of matrix polynomials expressed in the Chebyshev basis, which is often numerically more appropriate than the standard monomial basis for a larger degree d. The standard way of solving polynomial eigenvalue problems proceeds by linearization, which increases the problem size by a factor d. Consequently, the memory requirements of Krylov subspace methods applied to the linearization grow by this factor. In this paper, we develop two variants of the Arnoldi method that build the Krylov subspace basis implicitly, in a way that only vectors of length equal to the size of the original problem need to be stored. The proposed variants are generalizations of the so called Q-Arnoldi and TOAR methods, which have been developed for the monomial case. We also show how the typical ingredients of a full implementation of the Arnoldi method, including shift-and-invert and restarting, can be incorporated. Numerical experiments are presented for matrix polynomials up to degree 30 arising from the interpolation of nonlinear eigenvalue problems which stem from boundary element discretizations of PDE eigenvalue problems.

We demonstrate a high-resolution technique to measure the optical magnitude and phase responses of fiber gratings. The technique employs single-sideband modulation of an optical source and has spectral resolution in the hertz regime. The technique is demonstrated by measurement of the phase ripples of unapodized and apodized chirped gratings as well as the transmission spectrum of a pi-phase-shifted grating. Although it is demonstrated on fiber gratings, the technique is applicable to any optical device.

Abstract. Polynomial eigenvalue problems are often found in scientific computing applications. When the coefficient matrices of the polynomial are large and sparse, usually only a few eigenpairs are required and projection methods are the best choice. We focus on Krylov methods that operate on the companion linearization of the polynomial, but exploit the block structure with the aim of being memory-efficient in the representation of the Krylov subspace basis. The problem may appear in the form of a low-degree polynomial (quartic or quintic, say) expressed in the monomial basis, or a high-degree polynomial (coming from interpolation of a nonlinear eigenproblem) expressed in a non-monomial basis. We have implemented a parallel solver in SLEPc covering both cases, that is able to compute exterior as well as interior eigenvalues via spectral transformation. We discuss important issues such as scaling and restart, and illustrate the robustness and performance of the solver with some numerical experiments.

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We demonstrate a III-V/silicon hybrid external cavity laser with a tuning range larger than 60 nm at the C-band on a silicon-on-insulator platform. A III-V semiconductor gain chip is hybridized into the silicon chip by edge-coupling the silicon chip through a SiN spot size converter. The demonstrated packaging method requires only passive alignment and is thus suitable for high-volume production. The laser has a largest output power of 11 mW with a maximum wall-plug efficiency of 4.2%, tunability of 60 nm (more than covering the C-band), and a side-mode suppression ratio of 55 dB (>46 dB across the C-band). The lowest measured linewidth is 37 kHz (<80 kHz across the C-band), which is the narrowest linewidth using a silicon-based external cavity. In addition, we successfully demonstrate all silicon-photonics-based transmission of 34 Gbaud (272 Gb/s) dual-polarization 16-QAM using our integrated laser and silicon photonic coherent transceiver. The results show no additional penalty compared to commercially available narrow linewidth tunable lasers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental demonstration of a complete silicon photonic based coherent link. This is also the first experimental demonstration of >250 Gb/s coherent optical transmission using a silicon micro-ring-based tunable laser.

In the context of symmetric-definite generalized eigenvalue problems, it is often required to compute all eigenvalues contained in a prescribed interval. For large-scale problems, the method of choice is the so-called spectrum slicing technique: a shift-and-invert Lanczos method combined with a dynamic shift selection that sweeps the interval in a smart way. This kind of strategies were proposed initially in the context of unrestarted Lanczos methods, back in the 1990's. We propose variations that try to incorporate recent developments in the field of Krylov methods, including thick restarting in the Lanczos solver and a rational Krylov update when moving from one shift to the next. We discuss a parallel implementation in the SLEPc library and provide performance results.