Meep is a free and open-source software package for electromagnetics simulation via the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method spanning a broad range of applications.

Key Features

Time-Domain Simulation#

A time-domain electromagnetic simulation simply evolves Maxwell's equations over time within some finite computational volume, essentially performing a kind of numerical experiment. This can be used to calculate a wide variety of useful quantities. Major applications include:

  • Transmittance and Reflectance Spectra — by Fourier-transforming the response to a short pulse, a single simulation can yield the scattering amplitudes over a broadband spectrum.
  • Resonant Modes and Frequencies — by analyzing the response of the system to a short pulse, one can extract the frequencies, decay rates, and field patterns of the harmonic modes of lossy and lossless systems including waveguide and cavity modes.
  • Field Patterns (e.g. Green's functions) — in response to an arbitrary source via a continuous-wave (CW) input (fixed-ω).

Meep's scriptable interface makes it possible to combine many sorts of computations along with multi-parameter optimization in sequence or in parallel.

Tutorial/Basics provides examples of the various kinds of computations.

Download#

The source repository is hosted on GitHub. Gzipped tarballs of tagged versions are in Releases. The release history is in NEWS. Installation instructions are in Installation.

Documentation#

For a list of topics, see the left navigation sidebar. For new users, the most important items to review are the Introduction, Tutorial/Basics, and FAQ.

This documentation is for the master branch of the source repository. Note that certain features described in this documentation may therefore be unavailable if you are using a tagged release.

Discussion Forum#

For questions regarding setting up simulations, analyzing results, installation, etc., use the Discussions page on GitHub.

As an additional resource, archives of the meep-discuss mailing list, which is no longer active, are available which include postings from 2006-2021. These archives can also be accessed using a newsgroup reader via the NNTP interface address: news.gmane.io/gmane.comp.science.electromagnetism.meep.general.

Bug Reports and Feature Requests#

For bug reports and feature requests, please file a GitHub issue.

Acknowledgements#

The Meep project is maintained by the developer community on GitHub. Acknowledgements provides a complete listing of the project contributors.

Support and Feedback#

If you have questions or problems regarding Meep, you are encouraged to query the mailing list.