Finite Element Analysis of Stimulated Brillouin Scattering in Integrated Photonic Waveguides

We describe NumBAT, an open-source software tool for modelling stimulated Brillouin scattering in waveguides of arbitrary cross-section. It provides rapid calculation of optical and elastic dispersion relations, field profiles and gain with an easy-to-use Python front end. Additionally, we provide an open and extensible set of standard problems and reference materials to facilitate the bench-marking of NumBAT against subsequent tools. Such a resource is needed to help settle discrepancies between existing formulations and implementations, and to facilitate comparison between results in the literature. The resulting standardised testing framework will allow the community to gain confidence in new algorithms and will provide a common tool for the comparison of experimental designs of opto-acoustic waveguides.