Available Modeling Software

RP Photonics has at its disposal a significant amount of scientific software, which can be used in particular for numerical modeling purposes. There are basically three groups of computer programs:

User licenses are available for software which can be used by customers to do certain calculations themselves.
Within consulting work, RP Photonics can develop custom-made software for customers. In these cases, the software will usually be property of the customer who ordered its development.
Several very versatile programs are not for sale, but are used by RP Photonics within consulting projects. They often allow RP Photonics to get results in an amazingly short time.

All this is described in the following sections.

Note that software is just one part of the modeling issue; read the page on modeling for information on other aspects.

1. Software for Which User Licenses Can Be Obtained

RP Fiber Power for Simulations of the Performance of Fiber Lasers and Amplifiers

RP Fiber Power can calculate the distribution of optical powers in fiber lasers and amplifiers. For example, it can calculate for a fiber amplifier how signal and pump waves as well as amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) are distributed in the active fiber. This is an important tool for understanding and optimizing performance details such as power efficiency and noise figure.

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RP Resonator for Laser Resonator Design

RP Resonator can be used for calculations on optical resonators, in particular on laser resonators. It can not only calculate a wide range of properties of such resonators (such as the variation of beam radii, the sensitivity e.g. to thermal lensing and misalignment, dispersion from geometric effects, etc.), but also allows sophisticated optimizations. For example, it can be used for designing laser cavities which simultaneously meet a number of requirements, such as given mode sizes at certain positions, minimum sensitivity to thermal lensing and misalignment, minimum effect of aberrations on the beam quality, etc.

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RP Q-switch for Designing Q-switched Lasers

RP Q-switch can simulate the evolution of optical power and gain in Q-switched lasers (including bulk lasers and fiber lasers) and in subsequent amplifier stages.

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You don't actually need to buy a license for such software, but can also have the software applied at RP Photonics and buy only the generated results, just as for the software described in section 3.

2. Software Developed for Individual Customers

RP Photonics offers the development of specialized software for customers. Possible functions of such software are

various kinds of simulations, e.g. of laser and amplifier dynamics
other calculations in optics, e.g. concerning material dispersion, interferometers, Kramers-Kronig relations, etc.
specialized data acquisition and processing, e.g. calculation of noise spectra from data recorded in the time domain

In any case, RP Photonics can provide software with an easy to use interface. For example, input values can be entered in forms, output values are nicely formatted, results can be graphically shown, etc. Of course, high quality documentation is provided.

If you are interested, contact RP Photonics Consulting to find out what can be done.

3. Software for Internal Use of RP Photonics

Even though the customers will not use this software themselves, it is good to know what kind of software is available for use in consulting projects. Therefore, the most important software is briefly summarized in the following subsections. As the modeling is done by Dr. Rüdiger Paschotta, who is the author of all the mentioned software and has a deep experience in modeling, results can be obtained very quickly and efficiently, and are very reliable. Another advantage is that the customer does then not require own software licenses and does not have to invest any time to learn the handling of the software.

RP ProPulse for the Simulation of Pulse Propagation

RP ProPulse can simulate the propagation of short optical pulses in the resonators of mode-locked lasers, in synchronously pumped optical parametric oscillators, and in optical fibers. A wide variety of effects can be treated, including various kinds of optical nonlinearities, so that even extreme processes such as supercontinuum generation in photonic crystal fibers can be simulated. The very flexible user interface allows the user to quickly define the problem, generate output in the form of any kind of diagrams (including time/frequency plots and spectrograms), import or export tabulated data, do sophisticated evaluations (e.g. statistical processing for extracting noise properties), etc.

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RP Coating for the Design of Multilayer Structures

RP Coating is a powerful tool for the design of complex multilayer structures, such as laser mirrors, broadband anti-reflection coatings, fiber Bragg gratings, or various kinds of semiconductor structures. Its flexible user interface makes it easy to define multilayer structures in various ways. A great variety of properties of the structures can be calculated, including reflection and transmission amplitudes and phases, chromatic dispersion, internal field distribution, etc. Finally, RP Coating allows for sophisticated numerical optimization.

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Software for Various Purposes

Apart from the above mentioned software, RP Photonics has a variety of other programs for the following applications:

Calculation of dynamics in lasers and amplifiers, such as Q-switching dynamics, spiking, pulse build-up in regenerative amplifiers, etc.
Calculation of different orders of chromatic material dispersion from refractive index data, or of dispersion of prism pairs
Design of refractive index profiles of fibers
Calculations concerning phase matching of nonlinear processes (e.g. for an automatic systematic search for all possible phase-matching configurations in nonlinear crystal materials)
General optics calculations, e.g. concerning nonlinearities, soliton effects, optical filters, interference effects, Kramers-Kronig relations, etc.

These are just examples; many other things can be quickly and reliably calculated using existing software.

Quality Matters

Dr. Paschotta's software is not only powerful, but has a very high quality in various respects:

The underlying equations are based on a very decent physical understanding and the knowledge of relevant scientific literature.
The software design has been carefully planned from the beginning, enabling e.g. easy future expansions without changing the concept.
The programs have been carefully validated in many details, e.g. by comparison with analytically calculated results for special situations, or by detailed comparison with results from other researchers.
The user interfaces are so flexible that it is never necessary to include project-specific details in the source code. There is e.g. just one program (RP ProPulse) for the simulation of pulse propagation, and it is used for a great variety of different situations (associated with mode-locked lasers, sync-pumped parametric oscillators, or optical fibers) just by developing corresponding input files.

Before you try to develop such software yourself, consider the risks associated with required development time (always more than originally expected!), non-ideal algorithms (compromising accuracy and/or computation time) and errors (possibly misleading your development team). And note that software is only one requirement for numerical modeling: even more importantly, you need a detailed physical understanding, knowledge of possible approaches and mathematical techniques, experience concerning how to make a model useful, etc. Having a real expert for such jobs is certainly worth a lot.