NAME¶

mpb - compute eigenmodes of periodic dielectric structures

SYNOPSIS¶

mpb [OPTION]... [DEFINITION]... [CTLFILE]...

DESCRIPTION¶

MIT Photonic Bands (MPB) is a free program to compute the band structures (dispersion relations) and electromagnetic modes of periodic dielectric structures, and is applicable both to photonic crystals (photonic band-gap materials) and a wide range of other optical problems. Its features include: fully-vectorial, 3D computations; a flexible user-interface based upon the GNU Guile scripting language; output in HDF format; and iterative, targeted eigensolver methods to address very large problems by solving for only a few states near a specified frequency.

More information on MPB, including a detailed manual, can be found online at the MPB home page: http://ab-initio.mit.edu/mpb/

A typical invocation of MPB looks like:

mpb foo.ctl >& foo.out

This causes MPB to process the control file foo.ctl and redirect its output to foo.out. (One typically redirects output to a file, as the output is verbose and contains a number of comma-delimited datasets that one can extract by grepping.)

You can also use MPB in an interactive mode, in which you can type in MPB commands (in Scheme/Guile) and immediately see their results. Interactive mode is entered when you invoke mpb with no control files, or if your control files don't contain any run statements (which disable interactive mode), or if the last control file ends by setting (set! interactive? true) in which case interactive mode is entered after the control files execute.

Another useful feature is that you can alter parameters in your control files from the command line, by including definitions of the form variable=value as arguments to mpb (before the control files). This overrides the values of variables defined with define-param in the control file (including all of the predefined MPB input variables).

Multiple control files and definitions are executed in sequence, in the order they are specified on the command line.

OPTIONS¶

-h, --help

Display help on the command-line options and usage.

-V, --version

Print the version number and copyright info for mpb.

-v, --verbose

Verbose output.

BUGS¶

Send bug reports to S. G. Johnson, stevenj@alum.mit.edu.

AUTHORS¶

Written by Steven G. Johnson. Copyright (c) 1999-2012 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

SEE ALSO¶

mpb-split(1), mpb-data(1)