Far Field Plots - Contours?

[zekishaw]

In Lumerical, you can plot these sort of far field plots with colourmaps and the like. I was wandering if MEEP had the same functionality?

I'm a PhD student but the group I work within (or one of) does optical characterisation and nanofab, and the hope is that some of my designs will one day be fabricatable - The far field plots are useful for seeing how much light can be directed to collection optics and what collection angle, and I really don't like using Lumerical so was hoping that this a function that MEEP supports? I would imagine yes, but also it is not shown in the tutorials, unless I have missed it in which case apologies, a link would be appreciated!!

[zekishaw]

This is a generic one taken literally from their website but shows what I want to do. Secondarily, is there a version of teh docs that only contains the python interface? And tutorials for the C++? I am hoping for some speedup and hoping the C++ does this but please corect me if wrong!

[smartalecH]

The core timestepping is in C++. The python interface calls down to the core library directly. Using the C++ interface won't bring any additional speedup.

[zekishaw]

Ah I see! Thank you - I thought there may be some slowdown due to communication between the C++ routines and core python. Glad to hear this!

[smartalecH]

This is just a simple postprocessing visualization step. You can take any of the Near2Far tutorials to collect the powers in the far field for a large collection of angle pairs. Then you simply plot them how you wish.

To get exactly this plot, there are plenty of examples found on google, like this one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54209640/imshow-in-polar-coordinates

[zekishaw]

This is brilliant thank you!

[oskooi]

For an example of computing the radiation pattern in cylindrical coordinates using Matplotlib, see the functions plot_radiation_pattern_polar and plot_radiation_pattern_3d and the corresponding figure in #2629.