English

User Guide for the Discrete Dipole Approximation Code DDSCAT 7.3

Computational Physics 2013-05-29 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics Optics

Abstract

DDSCAT 7.3 is an open-source Fortran-90 software package applying the discrete dipole approximation to calculate scattering and absorption of electromagnetic waves by targets with arbitrary geometries and complex refractive index. The targets may be isolated entities (e.g., dust particles), but may also be 1-d or 2-d periodic arrays of "target unit cells", allowing calculation of absorption, scattering, and electric fields around arrays of nanostructures. The theory of the DDA and its implementation in DDSCAT is presented in Draine (1988) and Draine & Flatau (1994), and its extension to periodic structures in Draine & Flatau (2008), and efficient near-field calculations in Flatau & Draine (2012). DDSCAT 7.3 includes support for MPI, OpenMP, and the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL). DDSCAT supports calculations for a variety of target geometries. Target materials may be both inhomogeneous and anisotropic. It is straightforward for the user to "import" arbitrary target geometries into the code. DDSCAT automatically calculates total cross sections for absorption and scattering and selected elements of the Mueller scattering intensity matrix for user-specified scattering directions. DDSCAT 7.3 can efficiently calculate E and B throughout a user-specified volume containing the target. This User Guide explains how to use DDSCAT 7.3 to carry out electromagnetic scattering calculations, including use of DDPOSTPROCESS, a Fortran-90 code to perform calculations with E and B at user-selected locations near the target. A number of changes have been made since the last release, DDSCAT 7.2 .

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1305.6497,
  title  = {User Guide for the Discrete Dipole Approximation Code DDSCAT 7.3},
  author = {B. T. Draine and P. J. Flatau},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1305.6497},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

102 pages, 17 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1202.3424, arXiv:1002.1505, arXiv:0809.0337, arXiv:astro-ph/0409262, arXiv:astro-ph/0309069, arXiv:astro-ph/0008151

R2 v1 2026-06-22T00:23:50.729Z