Peacock.jl: Photonic crystals in Julia

Abstract

The Plane-wave Expansion Approach to Characterising Optical Crystals in k-space otherwise known as Peacock.jl is a Julia package for solving Maxwell’s equations using the Plane Wave Expansion Method (Rumpf, 2006) in order to predict the optical properties of photonic crystals. A photonic crystal is a material whose optical properties arise from its periodic structure (John, 1987; Yablonovitch, 1987), and Peacock.jl is named for the irridescent colours of peacock feathers which arise not from pigmentation but from the scattering of light by photonic crystals (Zi et al., 2003).