A convergence study of different Rigorous Coupled Wave Analysis (RCWA) approaches to time-harmonic electromagnetic scattering problems with applications to nanooptical structures
- Reliable numerical simulations of nano-optical structures are the key for design and pre-fabrication processes in diverse disciplines such as lithography in semiconductor industries, spectroscopy of biological molecules, optimization of quantum dot cavities for single-photon sources, and computation of atomic forces like the Casimir Effect. For these purposes a variety of different methods, e.g. FDTD, FEM and RCWA, are in use. On the one hand, FDTD and FEM are investigated intensively - both in mathematics and numerical experiments - and their approximations and convergence properties are well known. On the other hand, there is a lack of these insights in RCWA. In spite of this, RCWA is commonly used to simulate a wide range of systems. We review historical and modern contributions to convergence improvements with respect to RCWA from the early sugesstions to modern developments. We study the convergence rates of the open-source software S4 and analyze the algorithmic properties in detail. Furthermore, we compare RCWA and FEM simulations for different classes of problems including 1D-binary gratings and 2D-periodic photonic crystals.
| Author: | Philipp Gutsche, Thomas Judd, Frank Schmidt |
|---|---|
| Document Type: | Poster |
| Parent Title (German): | Verhandlungen der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft (DPG-Frühjahrstagung Berlin 2014) |
| Year of first publication: | 2014 |
