Electrodynamically self-consistent particle model in a massively parallel environment

The electrodynamically self-consistent particle model is implemented in a massively parallel environment. The dynamic fields are calculated using the finite-difference time domain (FD-TD) method using a non-uniform mesh and the perfectly matching layer technique. The ensemble Monte Carlo method is used for the particle transport simulation. Both the field dynamics and the carrier dynamics are solved consistently to accurately account for interactions.;The electro-optic (EO) sampling measurements of Son, et al. are simulated and the results indicate the velocity overshoot observed by the EO sampling measurements may be due to the carrier dynamics. However, interaction between the carriers and the fields, due to the energy exchange, and dispersion of the signal during travel through the transmission line prohibits the quantitative analysis of the experimental results without using the electrodynamically self-consistent particle model.;The static simulation is compared to the dynamic simulation in terms of the physical results and the computational cost. The carrier dynamics in the active MC region from the static simulations are similar to the results of the dynamic simulations. However, the traveling wave in the passive region can not be studied using static simulations. The computational cost for the static simulation is comparable to the cost of the dynamic simulation for the structure of the EO sampling experiments. Therefore, the choice between the static simulation and the dynamic simulation should be dictated by the physics rather than the computational costs for complicated 3-D problems.;In order to improve the turn around time of the simulation, the model is implemented on a massively parallel machine, MasPar MP-2. The parallelization of the FD-TD module and the EMC module is completed following the data-parallel model. Two strategies on the parallelization of the coupling of the FD-TD module and the EMC module are identified, implemented, and compared.