I have a hexagonal array of nanowires whose dimensions are commensurate with the long wavelength of the ultraviolet, visible and infrared ranges. Requires calculation of prohibited areas. Advise what and how?
MIT Photonic Bands (MPB) or Meep are free and widely used for the calculation of Photonic Crystals. You can find plenty of tutorials on the webpages (calculating band structures, defect states etc.)
https://meep.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
https://mpb.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
I would also recommend using MPB (bandstructure) and/or MEEP (FDTD solver). However, these do have limitations which can require some work to get past. The Scheme language used to build the input files is not necessarily easy to use (unless you know how that sort of language works already); and if your input file requires non-trivial numerical calculations, it can even seem obstructive. However, I think there is a python interface which might make this easier (but I have not used it). In addition, the meshing in MPB & Meep is rather simple, being just coordinate grids, so that can make getting good results for exotically shaped structures challenging.
On the plus side, having complete control over the input, and being able to export *all* data from a simulation easily is a big plus, especially when compared to the roadblocks commercial software (such as e.g. CST) can put in the way of getting all the data out. It is easy to wrap the simulations inside scripts (either internally, with Scheme; or externally) and automate your whole computational pipeline.
I also use the (free) ParaView to visualise the output (field profiles, etc),
which gives nice output and allows all sorts of python-based post processing and visualisation. However, wrapping the hdf5 output of MPB/Meep into the xdmf liked by paraview is not trivial. If you think Paraview sounds like a good idea, and lack alternatives, I have some rather unfriendly and somewhat hard to use shell scripts (bash) at
https://github.com/pak80/m2pvpk
which you might find helpful (or not; being on linux or unix will help) - I only really put them on github as an experiment. But you are welcome to try them out if you want.
You can also try optiwave. I think they have a 32-bit free version to download with an integrated bandsolver and FDTD solver. I think this programm is for the beginning more intuitive as it already have a GUI.
https://optiwave.com/applications/fdtd-photonic-crystal/
https://optiwave.com/optifdtd-manuals/fdtd-photonic-crystal-structure/
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