Tools for calculating optical properties of charged particles by DDSCAT software

DDSCAT is a software developed by Bruce T. Draine and Piotr J. Flatau that calculates scattering properties of single particles using discrete-dipole approximation (DDA).

Here presented set of tools allows to use the DDSAT software for charged particles with a surplus surface charge. The tools allows to do following tasks:

1. Import od DDSCAT particle model 'shape.dat' and calculation of electric field around charged particle by Laplace equation.

2. Calculation of the surface charge distribution from the potential field including smoothing the charge density across the surface and/or the volume of the particle.

The smoothing of the charge density helps:

• To suppress artefacts in charge distribution caused by discretisation of the particle.
• To lower the maximum levels of charge density (maximum values of refractive index); that helps DDSCAT to find stable solution.

3. Export of new charged particle model 'shape.dat' and corresponding materials files for DDSCAT.

4. Modifying the 'ddscat.par' configuration file of DDSCAT and batch calculations.

Read more about the set of the tools.
Download the source files (C/C++, batch-scripts) of tools.
Download Windows-executables of the tools, including DDSCAT 7.3 compiled for using of up to 256 materials.

Contact

František Kundracik
Department of Experimental Physics
Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics
Comenius University
Bratislava, Slovakia