Numerical methods for accurate description of ultrashort pulses in optical fibers

We consider a one-dimensional first-order nonlinear wave equation (the so-called forward Maxwell equation, FME) that applies to a few-cycle optical pulse propagating along a preferred direction in a nonlinear medium, e.g., ultrashort pulses in nonlinear fibers. The model is a good approximation to the standard second-order wave equation under assumption of weak nonlinearity. We compare FME to the commonly accepted generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation, which quantifies the envelope of a quickly oscillating wave field based on the slowly varying envelope approximation. In our numerical example, we demonstrate that FME, in contrast to the envelope model, reveals new spectral lines when applied to few-cycle pulses. We analyze and compare pseudo-spectral numerical schemes employing symmetric splitting for both models. Finally, we adopt these schemes to a parallel computation and discuss scalability of the parallelization

Mobility Modeling of Gallium Nitride Nanowires

abstract: Semiconductor nanowires have the potential to emerge as the building blocks of next generation field-effect transistors, logic gates, solar cells and light emitting diodes. Use of Gallium Nitride (GaN) and other wide bandgap materials combines the advantages of III-nitrides along with the enhanced mobility offered by 2-dimensional confinement present in nanowires. The focus of this thesis is on developing a low field mobility model for a GaN nanowire using Ensemble Monte Carlo (EMC) techniques. A 2D Schrödinger-Poisson solver and a one-dimensional Monte Carlo solver is developed for an Aluminum Gallium Nitride/Gallium Nitride Heterostructure nanowire. A GaN/AlN/AlGaN heterostructure device is designed which creates 2-dimensional potential well for electrons. The nanowire is treated as a quasi-1D system in this work. A self-consistent 2D Schrödinger-Poisson solver is designed which determines the subband energies and the corresponding wavefunctions of the confined system. Three scattering mechanisms: acoustic phonon scattering, polar optical phonon scattering and piezoelectric scattering are considered to account for the electron phonon interactions in the system. Overlap integrals and 1D scattering rate expressions are derived for all the mechanisms listed. A generic one-dimensional Monte Carlo solver is also developed. Steady state results from the 1D Monte Carlo solver are extracted to determine the low field mobility of the GaN nanowires.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Electrical Engineering 201

Simulating Maxwell–Schrödinger Equations by High-Order Symplectic FDTD Algorithm

A novel symplectic algorithm is proposed to solve the Maxwell–Schrödinger (M–S) system for investigating light–matter interaction. Using the fourth-order symplectic integration and fourth-order collocated differences, M–S equations are discretized in temporal and spatial domains, respectively. The symplectic finite-difference time-domain (SFDTD) algorithm is developed for accurate and efficient study of coherent interaction between electromagnetic fields and artificial atoms. Particularly, the Dirichlet boundary condition is adopted for modeling the Rabi oscillation problems under the semiclassical framework. To implement the Dirichlet boundary condition, image theory is introduced, tailored to the high-order collocated differences. For validating the proposed SFDTD algorithm, three-dimensional numerical studies of the population inversion in the Rabi oscillation are presented. Numerical results show that the proposed high-order SFDTD(4, 4) algorithm exhibits better numerical performance than the conventional FDTD(2, 2) approach at the aspects of accuracy and efficiency for the long-term simulation. The proposed algorithm opens up a promising way toward a high-accurate energy-conservation modeling and simulation of complex dynamics in nanoscale light–matter interaction

Universal Vector-Scalar Potential Framework for Inhomogeneous Electromagnetic System and Its Application in Semiclassical Quantum Electromagnetics

In this work, numerical solution to a general electromagnetic (EM) system is studied using a formalism based on the formulas for the E-B-A-φ formulas with different gauge conditions. The finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method is employed to discretize these formulas. In addition, the convolutional perfectly matched layer (CPML) technique is successfully applied to absorb outgoing scattered waves described by the proposed formulas. The gauge invariance of EM fields in inhomogeneous environment is demonstrated by numerical examples. Moreover, the proposed EM framework integrated with the Schrödinger equation is introduced to investigate the mesoscopic phenomenon for light-matter interaction, which is useful to design laser pulses for controlling discrete quantum states. The work offers a simple and general numerical EM framework, which is essential to bridge the classical EM and quantum mechanical systems