Hardware-neutral tools for the exploration of optical phenomena in near-resonant atomic systems

Abstract

In the last three decades, a lot of research has been devoted to the optical response of an atomic media in near-to-resonant conditions and to how nonlinear optical properties are enhanced in these systems. However, as current research turns its attention towards multi-level and multidimensional systems interacting with several electromagnetic fields, the ever-increasing complexity of these problems makes it difficult to treat the semiclassical model of the Maxwell–Bloch equations analytically without any strongly-limiting approximations. Thus, numerical methods and particularly robust and fast computational tools, capable of addressing such class of modern and future problems in photonics, are mandatory. In this paper, we describe the development and implementation of a Maxwell–Bloch numerical solver that exploits the massive parallelism of the GPUs to tackle efficiently problems in multidimensional settings or featuring Doppler broadening effects. This constitutes a simulation tool that is capable of addressing a vast class of problems with considerable reduction of simulation time, featuring speedups up to 15 compared with the same codes running on a CPU.