Convergence and accuracy of FDTD for plasmonics:
Though the use of FDTD to model nanoplasmonic structures continues to rise, a comprehensive study on the convergence and accuracy of the method for nanoplasmonic structures had yet to be reported. With access to the largest supercomuter in Canada at the time, the Blue Gene/Q from SOSCIP, we were able to investigate this in detail using our in-house software. Our study in Optics Express (2015), not only provides a thorough test of accuracy, convergence and high performance computing scalability, but presents useful guidelines for FDTD simulations for the plasmonic community, including highlighting where FDTD simulations fail.
We simulated three nanoplasmonic structures with unprecedented resolution: