Overview
Optical Material Overview #
This section describes the Optical Material Library (Optical Materials). Optical materials are used by optical solvers such as FDTD, FDFD, FDE, EME, and RCWA.
Optical Material #
This section describes the optical material library interface and general settings.
It covers the material list and material properties, assigning materials to structures, optical properties such as complex refractive index, dispersion, anisotropy, and nonlinearity, and how to fit and check material models.
Dielectric Material, (n, k) Material, and Conductive Material #
This section describes dielectric, (n, k), and conductive materials in the optical material library. They can be added in the optical library.
Debye Material, Drude Material, and Lorentz Material #
This section describes Debye, Drude, and Lorentz materials in the optical material library. They can be added in the optical library.
Debye material, Drude material, and Lorentz material are types of material models that are determined based on dispersion formulas.
Nonlinear Material #
This section describes nonlinear materials in the optical material library. They can be added in the optical library.
Nonlinear materials are those whose optical properties change with the intensity of the incident light field. Under certain conditions, such as phase matching, light interacts with the medium, exchanges energy, and thereby generates nonlinear optical phenomena like optical frequency doubling.
In the software, nonlinear materials consist of base materials and nonlinear coefficients. The software supports two nonlinear algorithms: Chi2 nonlinear and Chi3 Raman/Kerr nonlinear.
Sampled Data Material #
This section describes sampled data materials in the optical material library. They can be added in the optical library.
Sampled data material is one of the most important types of materials. Since sampled data material is derived from experimental data, measurement data may vary with different materials under different test conditions.
Graphene Material #
This section describes graphene materials in the optical material library. They can be added in the optical library.
Graphene is an ultra-thin optical material (consisting of a single layer of atoms). Graphene is normally characterized by the surface conductivity σ rather than permittivity ε.