Analysis of photonic crystals using the hybrid finite-element/finite-difference time domain technique based on the discontinuous Galerkin method

Two-dimensional photonic crystal structures are analyzed by a recently developed hybrid technique combining the finite-element time-domain (FETD) method and the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. This hybrid FETD/FDTD method uses the discontinuous Galerkin method as framework for domain decomposition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first hybrid FETD/FDTD method that allows non-conformal meshes between different FETD and FDTD subdomains. It is also highly parallelizable. These properties are very suitable for the computation of periodic structures with curved surfaces. Numerical examples for the computation of the scattering parameters of two-dimensional photonic bandgap structures are presented as applications of the hybrid FETD/FDTD method. Numerical results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed hybrid method. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.