Photonic bandstructure engineering

The Fabry-Perot cavity discussed in my previous post is only a simple example of a much wider class of resonators, which control the way light behaves inside the laser and how its beam propagates outside. Each laser resonator is characterized by a refractive index function n = n(x,y,z) which may vary over space and the boundary conditions, affecting the …

FEM electromagnetic simulations

The finite element method (FEM) is a numerical approach widely used in computational photonics to harness the complexity of Maxwell’s partial differential equations. FEM was originally invented to help civil and aerospace engineers with their structural design, but soon it was adopted in other fields of science and engineering due to its efficiency and versatility. …

Laser light design

Since the invention of laser technology in the late 1950s, laser light has become a crucial element of everyday life for billions of people. High-speed telecommunication, industrial production, healthcare, security and defense are just some of the fields where lasers have had a huge impact in the last decades. Figure 1: Detail of a Michelson interferometer …