mbsolve: An open-source solver tool for the Maxwell-Bloch equations

• DOI: 10.1016/j.cpc.2021.108097
• Publication Date: 2021-07-16T16:00:42Z
• Authors: Michael Riesch; Christian Jirauschek
• Keywords: Solver; Electromagnetic field solver; Bloch equations

The Maxwell-Bloch equations are a valuable tool to model light-matter interaction, where the application examples range from the description of pulse propagation in two-level media to the elaborate simulation of optoelectronic devices, such as the quantum cascade laser (QCL). In this work, we present mbsolve, an open-source solver tool for the Maxwell-Bloch equations. Here, we consider the one-dimensional Maxwell's equations, which are coupled to the Lindblad equation. The resulting generalized Maxwell-Bloch equations are treated without invoking the rotating wave approximation (RWA). Since this full-wave treatment is computationally intensive, we provide a flexible framework to implement different numerical methods and/or parallelization techniques. On this basis, we offer two solver implementations that use OpenMP for parallelization.