Abstract
We developed an open-source Plane Wave Expansion Method solver using Python and a custom Tkinter library to solve a design oriented problem of photonic crystal dispersion for known classical examples, custom geometries, and symmetries. Such structures are capable of light confinement, omnidirectional reflection, beam collimation and negative refraction. We dive deeper into the diagonally anisotropic photonic crystals, whose Plane Wave Expansion algorithm is directly embedded in the application. The user interface is present in the developer’s repository link: https://github.com/ZenTunturi/ZenBand.
Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Funding
D.G. acknowledges funding from the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT), grant No. S-MIP-23-49. A.Z. and I.L. acknowledge the “Universities’ Excellence Initiative” programme by the Ministry of Education, Science and Sports of the Republic of Lithuania under the agreement with the Research Council of Lithuania (project No. S-A-UEI-23–6).
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I.L. and A.Z. developed ZenBand academic and commercial software, D.G. is the leader of the technical project. All authors contributed equally to this paper. I.L. and A.Z. have made equal contributions to the ZenBand software.
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Zinkevičius, A., Lukošiūnas, I. & Gailevičius, D. ZenBand: a numerical solver of photonic crystals with a graphical user interface. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-37129-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-37129-2
