PyCharge: An open-source Python package for self-consistent electrodynamics simulations of Lorentz oscillators and moving point charges

TL;DR

PyCharge is an open-source Python package that performs self-consistent electrodynamics simulations of moving point charges and Lorentz oscillators, accurately capturing dipole interactions and radiative properties with high computational efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, open-source Python tool for self-consistent electrodynamics simulations, including moving dipoles and their radiative interactions, validated against analytical Green's function solutions.

Findings

Accurately reproduces dipole radiative properties with <0.2% error.

Successfully models near-field dipole interactions and their effects.

Parallelized for high-performance computing environments.

Abstract

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 require a full dipole response to yield the correct physics, are calculated by PyCharge and shown to be in excellent agreement with the analytical Green's function results ($<0.2\%$ relative error, over a wide range of spatial separations). Moving dipoles can also be modeled by specifying the dipole's origin position as a function of time. PyCharge includes a parallelized version of the dipole simulation method to enable the parallel execution of computationally demanding simulations on high performance computing environments to significantly improve run time.