.\" Copyright (C) 1999-2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
.\"
.\" This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
.\" it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
.\" the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
.\" (at your option) any later version.
.\"
.\" This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
.\" but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
.\" MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
.\" GNU General Public License for more details.
.\"
.\" You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
.\" along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
.\" Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA
.\"
.TH MPB 1 "January 27, 2000" "MPB" "MIT Photonic-Bands Package"
.SH NAME
mpb \- compute eigenmodes of periodic dielectric structures
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B mpb
[\fIOPTION\fR]... [\fIDEFINITION\fR]... [\fICTLFILE\fR]...
.SH DESCRIPTION
.PP
.\" Add any additional description here
MIT Photonic Bands (MPB) is a free program to compute the band
structures (dispersion relations) and electromagnetic modes of
periodic dielectric structures, and is applicable both to photonic
crystals (photonic band-gap materials) and a wide range of other
optical problems. Its features include: fully-vectorial, 3D
computations; a flexible user-interface based upon the GNU Guile
scripting language; output in HDF format; and iterative, targeted
eigensolver methods to address very large problems by solving for only
a few states near a specified frequency.
.PP
More information on MPB, including a detailed manual, can be found
online at the MPB home page:
.I http://ab-initio.mit.edu/mpb/
.PP
A typical invocation of MPB looks like:
.PP
.\"   .Vb 1
\&    mpb foo.ctl >& foo.out
.\"   .Ve
.PP
This causes MPB to process the control file foo.ctl and redirect its output
to foo.out.  (One typically redirects output to a file, as the output is
verbose and contains a number of comma-delimited datasets that one can
extract by grepping.)
.PP
You can also use MPB in an interactive mode, in which you can type in
MPB commands (in Scheme/Guile) and immediately see their results.
Interactive mode is entered when you invoke
.I mpb
with no control files, or if your control files don't contain any
.I run
statements (which disable interactive mode), or if the last control file ends
by setting
.I (set! interactive? true)
in which case interactive mode is entered after the control files
execute.
.PP
Another useful feature is that you can alter parameters in your control files
from the command line, by including definitions of the form
\fIvariable\fR=\fIvalue\fR as arguments to
.I mpb
(before the control files).  This overrides the values of variables
defined with
.I define-param
in the control file (including all of the predefined MPB input variables).
.PP
Multiple control files and definitions are executed in sequence, in
the order they are specified on the command line.
.SH OPTIONS
.TP
\fB\-h\fR, \fB\--help\fR
Display help on the command-line options and usage.
.TP
\fB\-V\fR, \fB\--version\fR
Print the version number and copyright info for mpb.
.TP
\fB\-v\fR, \fB\--verbose\fR
Verbose output.
.SH BUGS
Send bug reports to S. G. Johnson, stevenj@alum.mit.edu.
.SH AUTHORS
Written by Steven G. Johnson.  Copyright (c) 1999-2012 by
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
mpb-split(1), mpb-data(1)