FDTD

The Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method is the most straightforward simulation method for classical electromagnetic waves. 

Here, I introduce an efficient FDTD simulation package which is freely available. 

ALiS (A Light Simulator) is a numerical simulation package of C language library based on the FDTD method, developed by Ho-Seok Ee at Kongju National University, South Korea. It can be downloaded from GitHub. 

Link: https://github.com/hseelab/alis

Manual (pdf download)

The validity of ALiS has been tested in more than a hundred publications. Here are some examples.

1. Ho‐Seok Ee, Kyung‐Deok Song, Sun‐Kyung Kim, Hong‐Gyu Park*, "Finite-Difference Time-Domain Algorithm for Quantifying Light Absorption in Silicon Nanowires," Israel Journal of Chemistry 52 1027-1036 (2012).  [link]

2. Taesu Ryu, Moohyuk Kim, Yongsop Hwang, Myung-Ki Kim,* and Jin-Kyu Yang,* "High-efficiency SOI-based metalenses at telecommunication wavelengths," Nanophotonics 11 4697 (2022). [link][pdf][SI_pdf][SI_mp4] 

3. Yongsop Hwang, Min-Soo Hwang, Won Woo Lee, Won Il Park, and Hong-Gyu Park*, "Metal­-coated silicon nanowire plasmonic waveguides," Applied Physics Express 6 042502 (2013). [link][pdf][bibtex] 

4. Yongsop Hwang, and Hong-Gyu Park*, "Geometric dependence of metal-coated silicon nanowire plasmonic waveguides," Journal of Optics 16 025001 (2014). [link][pdf][bibtex]

5. Yoon-Ho Kim, Soon-Hong Kwon, Ho-Seok Ee, Yongsop Hwang, You-Shin No, and Hong-Gyu Park*, "Dependence of Q factor on surface roughness in a plasmonic cavity," Journal of the Optical Society of Korea 20 188-191 (2016).  [link][pdf][bibtex] 

ALiS can be cited in a published material as:

Ho-Seok Ee, A Light Simulator based on the FDTD method, GitHub repository, https://github.com/hseelab/alis, (Version 1.2.0), 2022.

This manual can be cited as:

Yongsop Hwang, ALiS: A Light Simulator - A library for FDTD simulation, https://github.com/scigg/alis_manual, 2025.