New publication in arXiv!

Exciting news for the nanophotonics and computational electromagnetics communities!

I’m thrilled to share a new arXiv preprint detailing HELIOS (HomogEneous and Layered medIa Optical Scattering), a new powerful open-source software for modeling light scattering. Developed by myself, under the supervision of Prof. Olivier J.F. Martin at EPFL’s Nanophotonics and Metrology Laboratory (NAM), this tool serves as a valuable resource for the rigorous design and analysis of complex nanophotonic scattering systems.

Here is what makes HELIOS stand out:

• Multiple Environments: It simulates electromagnetic scattering by nanostructures embedded in homogeneous, stratified, or periodic backgrounds.

• Robust Formulation: The software implements the Poggio-Miller-Chang-Harrington-Wu-Tsai (PMCHWT) formulation, utilizing Rao-Wilton-Glisson (RWG) functions on triangular meshes, which is highly reliable for solving scattering problems with penetrable objects.

• Periodic Structures: For 2D lattices like photonic crystals and metasurfaces, the code applies Ewald’s transformation to efficiently evaluate the periodic Green’s tensor.

• Layered Media: It tackles stratified media using a matrix-friendly formulation and accelerates the computation of Sommerfeld integrals through a smart tabulation-interpolation scheme.

• Comprehensive Outputs: The program calculates crucial optical quantities, including scattering, absorption, and extinction cross-sections, as well as reflectance, transmittance, and near-field distributions.

• Accessible Architecture: HELIOS features a 𝐂++ core for intensive computational operations, seamlessly managed by a Python interface for simulation setup, execution, and post-processing. Additionally, HELIOS provides a user-friendly GUI and detailed documentation about its installation, usage and all its scripts.

Whether you are modeling isolated scatterers, infinite periodic structures, or complex multilayer environments, HELIOS offers a single framework to handle it all! The code is open-source and available on GitHub.

Check out the full arXiv preprint to see the detailed formulations and validation examples!

#Nanophotonics #ComputationalElectromagnetics #IntegralEquations #OpenSource #HELIOS #EPFL #NAM #Optics #LightScattering #Simulation #Physics #Research