Welcome to StrawberryFields

StrawberryFields is a complete suite written as part of my Masters Program with the Institute of Nanoscale Technology at the University of Technology Sydney that is designed to allow nanoscale electromagnetic devices to be easily built and tested from within a user friendly GUI.

It incorporates PC based front end modelling and data display client that allows finite difference compatible devices to be built and passed to a back end processor that crunches the numbers and returns the data for display.

The back end is an extensible collection of classes written to be multiprocessor compatible that breaks the model down into processing blocks, calculates the appropriate fields and stores the data in a myql database for later display.

It has taken a lot longer than originally intended, but StrawberryFields has finally been validated at optical frequencies for gold using the three main complex Yee FDTD algorithms of Recursive Convolution, Z Transform and Accessry Differential equations. It also now includes a Transmission Line Matrix algorithm.

StrawberryFields is still under development. Historically we are at that point in history in 2008 where the Dow and every other stock market around the world has decided to take a nose dive. That means to keep a roof over my head I have to return to work. More details will be posted on my blog. Where the code is is Version 1.0 based around MySQL is working and has been validated. I am not able to release it until I have the time available to handle the inevitable flood of technical queries. So until I can free myself from a day job again we will have to wait.

The new version, StrawberryFields 2.0 which is based around XML as a communication layer rather than MySQL is in progress. This is much improved over the earlier code which drew heavily upon building up layers of 2D material to make a 3D object. The new code incorporates far simpler creation and editing of collections of Nano Rods, Spheres and other 3D objects of interest to the researcher.

StrawberryFields features:

• Easy to use GUI
• Yee and TLM
• Includes Absorbing Boundary Conditions (PML)
• Variety of source signals.
• Displays a variety of interesting fields derived from E and B
• Allows probes to be inserted which collect a time series and return the fourier spectrum
• Backend runs on windows as well as linux - clusters (to come)