Nonlinear Lorentz Model for Explicit Integration of Optical Nonlinearity in FDTD

Abstract

Including optical nonlinearity in FDTD software in a stable, efficient, and rigorous way can be challenging. Traditional methods address this challenge by solving an implicit form of Maxwell’s equations iteratively. Reaching numerical convergence over the entire numerical space at each time step demands significant computational resources, which can be a limiting factor for the modeling of large-scale three-dimensional nonlinear optics problems (complex photonics devices, laser filamentation, ...). Recently, we proposed an explicit methodology based on a nonlinear generalization of the Lorentz dispersion model and developed example cases where it was used to account for both linear and nonlinear optical effects. An overview of this work is proposed here.