PhoSSiL is a library of C++ classes that can be used to simulate photonics systems including optical fiber communications systems and lasers. It was written by Dr. John Zweck, Dr. Curtis Menyuk and a team of graduate students and postdocs in the Optical Fiber Communications Laboratory at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) and is currently maintained by John Zweck.
Work on PhoSSiL, which was originally called the Optical Communication Systems Simulator (OCS), was begun by Ivan Lima in 2000. Other contributors include Aurenice de Menezes Oliveira (formerly Aurenice Lima), Brian Marks, Oleg Sinkin, Ronald Holzloehner, Zhihang (Jonathan) Hu, Wenze Xi, Walter Pellegrini, Anshul Karla, Hai Xu, Hua Jiao, and Junping Wen.
The PhoSSiL bibliography lists Masters and PhD Theses and journal papers that describe the models and algorithms in PhoSSiL as well as the results of simulations produced using PhoSSiL. Taken together the results presented in these documents provide an extensive validation of PhoSSiL. Validations of the algorithms and code in PhoSSiL were performed by comparison with analytic formulae (where available), other codes, other algorithms, and laboratory experiments that were mostly performed by Professor Gary Carter and Professor Li Yan and their students at UMBC.
PhoSSiL will soon be released as open source software freely available to the academic community and US government researchers. For more information on how to obtain a copy of the code contact John Zweck (zweck 'at' umbc 'dot' edu).
Industrial researchers interested in using PhoSSiL should contact John Zweck or Curtis Menyuk (menyuk 'at' umbc 'dot' edu) to negotiate a software license.
This web site contains documentation on how to install and run PhoSSiL as well as extensive documentation. Additional documentation will be added as time permits.
Coming soon!