PyCharge swMATH ID: 39605 Software Authors: Matthew J. Filipovich, Stephen Hughes Description: PyCharge: An open-source Python package for self-consistent electrodynamics simulations of Lorentz oscillators and moving point charges. PyCharge is a computational electrodynamics Python simulator that can calculate the electromagnetic fields and potentials generated by moving point charges and can self-consistently simulate dipoles modeled as Lorentz oscillators. To calculate the total fields and potentials along a discretized spatial grid at a specified time, PyCharge computes the retarded time of the point charges at each grid point, which are subsequently used to compute the analytical solutions to Maxwell’s equations for each point charge. The Lorentz oscillators are driven by the electric field in the system and PyCharge self-consistently determines the reaction of the radiation on the dipole moment at each time step. PyCharge treats the two opposite charges in the dipole as separate point charge sources and calculates their individual contributions to the total electromagnetic fields and potentials. The expected coupling that arises between dipoles is captured in the PyCharge simulation, and the modified radiative properties of the dipoles (radiative decay rate and frequency shift) can be extracted using the dipole’s energy at each time step throughout the simulation. The modified radiative properties of two dipoles separated in the near-field, which requires a full dipole response to yield the correct physics, are calculated by PyCharge in excellent agreement with the analytical Green’s function results (<0.2 Homepage: https://pycharge.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ Source Code: https://github.com/MatthewFilipovich/pycharge Dependencies: Python Keywords: Physics; arXiv:physics.comp-ph; arXiv_physics.class-ph; Optics; arXiv_physics.optics; PyCharge; Python; Computational Electrodynamics; Nano-Optics; Electromagnetic Field Solver; Lorentz oscillators; moving point charges Related Software: mpi4py; SciPy; Matplotlib; Python Cited in: 1 Document Standard Articles 1 Publication describing the Software Year PyCharge: An open-source Python package for self-consistent electrodynamics simulations of Lorentz oscillators and moving point charges arXiv Matthew J. Filipovich, Stephen Hughes 2021 Cited by 2 Authors 1 Filipovich, Matthew J. 1 Hughes, Stephen W. Cited in 1 Serial 1 Computer Physics Communications Cited in 4 Fields 1 Partial differential equations (35-XX) 1 Numerical analysis (65-XX) 1 Optics, electromagnetic theory (78-XX) 1 Quantum theory (81-XX) Citations by Year