Simulation of photonic crystal nanocavity using the FETI‐DPEM method

The dual-primal finite element tearing and interconnecting (FETI-DPEM) method, as an application of a nonoverlapping domain decomposition method to the finite element analysis of electromagnetic problems, is applied to the three-dimensional (3D) full-wave simulation of a high quality (Q) factor photonic crystal (PhC) nanocavity in an optically thin dielectric slab. Curvilinear tetrahedral elements and higher-order vector basis functions are employed in the FEM to accurately represent the field in the PhC nanocavity. Geometrical repetitions associated with PhCs nanocavities are fully exploited, which significantly reduces the computational complexity and memory requirement. Moreover, due to its domain decomposition nature, the FETI-DPEM method is highly parallelizable, which further accelerates the computation using parallel computing techniques. As a result, such a method is ideally suited for the fullwave analysis of PhC nanocavities. Simulations of a high Q PhC nanocavity using the FETI-DPEM method are carried out to demonstrate the efficiency of the method. The calculated Q factors are compared with previously published data. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 50: 2083–2086, 2008; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.23580