Photonic Band Structure Computation Using FLAME

The flexible local approximation method (FLAME) is applied for the first time to the computation of the band diagrams of periodic dielectric structures (photonic crystals). Numerical experiments show that FLAME attains high accuracy on fairly coarse grids, with 6-8 orders of magnitude lower errors in the dispersion curves than alternative methods such as finite-element analysis or plane wave expansion with the same number of degrees of freedom.