Acknowledgements#

Authors#

Meep originated as part of graduate research at MIT in the mid 2000s with initial contributions by Steven G. Johnson, Ardavan Oskooi, David Roundy, Mihai Ibanescu, and Peter Bermel. The project has been under continuous development for nearly 25 years. Currently, the Meep project is maintained by an active developer community on GitHub, and has benefited from important contributions by many authors over the years. Christopher Hogan and M.T. Homer Reid led the development of the current Python interface, the mode-decomposition feature, and the initial GDS import functionality. M.T. Homer Reid and Alec Hammond developed the adjoint solver. Alex Cerjan assisted with adding support for saturable absorption via multilevel atomic gain media. Alec Hammond developed the visualization module. Yidong Chong and Alex Cerjan added support for gyrotropic media. Andreas Hoenselaar contributed to several performance enhancements. Krishna Gadepalli added support for checkpointing the simulation state. Andreas Hoenselaar added DFT decimation and other performance improvements. Mo Chen added adjoint gradients for cylindrical coordinates, LDOS, connectivity constraints, and near-to-far transformations. Arjun Khurana added Padé extrapolation. Wenchao Ma contributed several improvements to the adjoint solver. Daniel Lloyd-Jones implemented the BFAST algorithm for oblique incidence. Luocheng Huang contributed 3d mesh import, improved OpenMP parallelism, and other improvements. We are also grateful to many other contributors too numerous to list here.

Referencing#

We request that you cite the following technical reference in any work for which you used Meep:

A. Oskooi, D. Roundy, M. Ibanescu, P. Bermel, J.D. Joannopoulos, and S.G. Johnson, “MEEP: A flexible free-software package for electromagnetic simulations by the FDTD method,” Computer Physics Communications, Vol. 181, pp. 687-702 (2010) (pdf).

If you use Meep's adjoint topology-optimization facilities, you should additionally cite:

A. M. Hammond, A. Oskooi, M. Chen, Z. Lin, S. G. Johnson, and S. E. Ralph, “High-performance hybrid time/frequency-domain topology optimization for large-scale photonics inverse design,” Optics Express, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 4467–4491 (2022).

If you want a one-sentence description of the algorithm for inclusion in a publication, we recommend something like:

"Simulations were performed with the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method [ref FDTD], using an open-source software package [ref Meep]."

General references on the FDTD method include, for example:

A. Taflove and S.C. Hagness, Computational Electrodynamics: The Finite-Difference Time-Domain Method, Artech: Norwood, MA, 2005.
A. Taflove, A. Oskooi, and S.G. Johnson, Advances in FDTD Computational Electrodynamics: Photonics and Nanotechnology, Artech: Norwood, MA, 2013.

Financial Support#

Meep's development has been supported by Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 1 and 2 awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under award numbers 1647206 and 1758596. Initial development was supported in part by the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center program of the NSF under award numbers DMR-9400334 and DMR-0819762, by the Army Research Office through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies under DAAD-19-02-D0002, and DARPA under N00014-05-1-0700 administered by the Office of Naval Research.