Time-domain analysis of periodic anisotropic media at oblique incidence: an efficient FDTD implementation

Abstract

We describe an efficient implementation of the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method as applied to lightwave propagation through periodic media with arbitrary anisotropy (birefringence). A permittivity tensor with non-diagonal elements is successfully integrated here with periodic boundary conditions, bounded computation space, and the split-field update technique. This enables modeling of periodic structures using only one period even with obliquely incident light in combination with both monochromatic (sinusoidal) and wideband (time-domain pulse) sources. Comparisons with results from other techniques in four validation cases are presented and excellent agreement is obtained. Our implementation is freely available on the Web.

Optical and Physical Applications of Photocontrollable Materials: Azobenzene-Containing and Liquid Crystalline Polymers

“…Periodic molecular distribution with uniaxial anisotropy can be placed on the analysis regions. Polarization holograms have been simulated, and these results are consistent to with other theoretical [81,82] and experimental results [83]. The visualized optical propagation obtained from the simulations is especially useful for developments of optical devices.…”

Three-Dimensional Vector Holograms in Photoreactive Anisotropic Media

“…The FDTD method can analyze anisotropic media such as liquid crystals (Kriezis & Elston, 1999, 2000Titus et al, 2001;Scharf, 2007). In addition, it has been reported that the FDTD method is suitable for characterizing anisotropic gratings recorded by vector holography (Oh & Escuti, 2006Ono et al 2008aOno et al , 2008b. Figure 9 schematically illustrates the model for the FDTD calculation in this study.…”

Split-Field Finite-Difference Time-Domain Scheme for Kerr-Type Nonlinear Periodic Media

“…We also assume Uniaxial Perfectly Matched Layer [37,38] (UPML) for the truncation in the z direction. The input plane wave source is excited in the structure following the schemes proposed in [23,39] for both continuous and time-limited pulsed waves.…”

“…Following [29,39], we next eliminate the time-derivative terms ∂/∂t ⇔ jω by splitting the field variables:…”