CE-ADI-FDTD method for active photonic device simulation with semiconductor/solid-state media

Abstract

This paper presents a complex-envelope (CE) alternating-direction-implicit (ADI) finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method to treat light-matter interaction self-consistently with electromagnetic field evolution for efficient simulations of active photonic devices. The active medium (AM) is modeled using an efficient multi-level system of carrier rate equations. To include AM in the CE-ADI formulation, a 1st-order differential system composed of CE fields in AM is first set up. The system sub-matrices are then determined and used in an efficient ADI splitting formula. From microdisk laser simulations, the proposed method is shown to consume 22% of the explicit FDTD CPU time.