QuEST: The Quantum Electromagnetics Simulation Toolkit

Simulation software to model the evolution & electromagnetic interactions of two-level quantum dots. Designed and built at Michigan State University.

Prerequisites

• C++14-compatible compiler (tested with GCC and Clang)
• Eigen3 (at least v3.2.2)
• Boost (at least v.1.55.0):
  • Program Options
  • MultiArray
  • Test
• SILO (optional)

Building

QuEST relies on CMake to generate appropriate compile scripts. To build the executable, first run

mkdir build
cd build

followed by

cmake $PATH_TO_QUEST && make

This will attempt to build

• quest (simulation executable)
• qtest (unit test executable)
• point_gen (utility to quickly generate distributions of points)
• siloify (utility to convert quest output to the SILO file format for use in e.g. VisIt)

Running

QuEST requires three files to specify the parameters of a simulation: input.cfg, dots.cfg, and pulse.cfg. Of these, input.cfg has the most flexibility; you can specify alternate paths to the other configuration files as well as modify the simulation parameters (speed of light, number of particles, timestep, etc.). Run ./quest --help for details of the possible parameter options.

dots.cfg contains a list of quantum dots, one-per-line, each with the following format:

x y z omega_0 T1 T2 dx dy dz
──┬── ───┬─── ──┬── ───┬────
  │      │      │      └──── transition dipole moment
  │      │      └─────────── decay time constants   
  │      └────────────────── transition frequency
  └───────────────────────── spatial coordinates

pulse.cfg specifies the incident Gaussian pulse(s) with the following format:

E_0 delay sigma omega_L kx ky kz px py pz
─┬─ ──┬── ──┬── ───┬─── ───┬──── ───┬────
 │    │     │      │       │        └──── polarization vector (normalized)
 │    │     │      │       └───────────── wavevector
 │    │     │      └───────────────────── laser frequency
 │    │     └──────────────────────────── pulse width (dimensionless)
 │    └────────────────────────────────── peak shift
 └─────────────────────────────────────── amplitude

With all three input files in place, simply run the simulation with ./quest. The executable will read everything in, perform the calculation with a percentage complete indicator, and then produce output.dat which contains the trajectory of the matrix elements for every particle in the system.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for details on submitting changes.