A program for calculating photonic band structures, Greenʹs functions and transmission/reflection coefficients using a non-orthogonal FDTD method Original Research Article

In this paper we present an updated version of our ONYX program for calculating photonic band structures using a non-orthogonal finite difference time domain method. This new version employs the same transparent formalism as the first version with the same capabilities for calculating photonic band structures or causal Greenʹs functions but also includes extra subroutines for the calculation of transmission and reflection coefficients. Both the electric and magnetic fields are placed onto a discrete lattice by approximating the spacial and temporal derivatives with finite differences. This results in discrete versions of Maxwellʹs equations which can be used to integrate the fields forwards in time. The time required for a calculation using this method scales linearly with the number of real space points used in the discretization so the technique is ideally suited to handling systems with large and complicated unit cells.