Preface

Photonic Laser Simulation Kit is a comprehensive tool for numerical analysis of broad range of physical phenomena in photonic devices. It has been designed for simulating mainly semiconductor lasers, however the range of the covered devices is much larger and includes e.g. transistors, light emitting diodes, photodetectors, etc. Due to its modular nature it is possible to perform computations of virtually any physical phenomenon in micro-scale structures.

PLaSK has been originally developed in a Photonics Group of Lodz University of Technology, which has many-year experience in numerical analysis of semiconductor lasers. Such structures, due to their complex structure, often fail to be correctly simulated by popular general-purpose software. However, in designing PLaSK we have taken special care to consider all the special cases of semiconductor lasers and to choose (or invent where necessary) appropriate algorithms.

This manual presents the software and gives instructions on using it. It is structured as follows: First there is a quick start guide, which gives brief overview on the whole software, instructs how to install it, and introduces its main features in a form of short tutorials and examples. The second part describes in detail all the elements of the input data file and presents complete manual of all the general features available in the software. The third part covers usage of graphical user interface and, finally, the last part lists all the default computational solvers and gives the complete reference to their usage.