Detailed project information

From a computational point of view, the central question that we address in this proposal is: Can we simulate the propagation of electromagnetic waves, not by solving Maxwell?s equation, but by simulating the?photons? as particles. By itself, this idea is not new: There have been several attempts to add interference effects to ray tracing algorithms. The difference with what is proposed here is that our approach has been shown to account for all interference effects exactly. In this proposal we want to explore whether this line of thought can be fruitful for practical applications.

This project requests supercomputer resources to validate the results of our event-based simulation approach for nontrivial interference and diffraction problems. This validation involves the solution of the Maxwell equations for very large systems with fairly complicated geometrical objects, requiring substantial amounts of memory and CPU time.