Lightwave Explorer

Easily simulate nonlinear optics

io.github.NickKarpowicz.LightwaveExplorer

Lightwave explorer is an open source nonlinear optics simulator, intended to be fast, visual, and flexible for students and researchers to play with ultrashort laser pulses and nonlinear optics without having to buy a laser first. Supports both CUDA and CPU calculations. Its purpose and goals are:

Easily-extensible database of materials
Multiple physical models, including the unidirectional nonlinear wave equation and finite-difference time-domain approaches.
Efficient code so that complicated systems can be simulated in 3D: Real laser pulses can be messy, and if they weren't so before a nonlinear crystal, there's a good chance they are after. Multidimensional simulations open up the weird world of spatiotemporal couplings. You have options for very fast simulations when there's a symmetry to use (e.g. cylindrical), alongside fully 3D propagation
A graphical interface that lets you see what you're doing
A flexible sequence mode to string together elements: not just nonlinear crystals, also spherical or parabolic mirrors, apertures, filters, free space propagation and more
Fitting/optimization routines
A Python module for easy postprocessing

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Screenshots

The Lightwave Explorer main window in dark mode, with additional plots of the real-space and momentum-space fields

The Lightwave Explorer main window in light mode showing a Laguerre-Gauss input beam

Observed history

App	Change	Version	When ↓

No observed changes yet.

The initial import establishes a baseline. Future version changes will appear here.

Browse the app catalogue →

Upstream releases

Release notes supplied by the developer. These dates are not Flathub package publication times.

2026.16 Feb 2026

New Features:

Support for complex input beams, on either a Hermite-Gauss or Laguerre-Gauss basis with frequency-dependent beamwaist, rotation, 3D offset and angle.
offsetAperture sequence function for including a non-centered iris.

Bug Fixes:

Will load the last crystal in the database even if there isn't a newline at the end.
Circular polarization settings are explained in the tooltip, and values of outside of -1..1 are no longer passed to the simulation with odd results
2026.1.2 update: fix x-angle in beam specification
2026.1.3: further fixes for beam view glitches for long renders
2026.1.4: fix addPulse sequence function

2025.628 Aug 2025

Bug fix release:

Fix a bug where setting a non-colinear angle would cause pulse injection to fail in FDTD simulations
Fix a bug where a failed load of a custom FDTD grid wouldn't cause the simulation to throw an exception

2025.525 Jun 2025

Bug fix release, plus some extra crystals:

Fixes bug where files could not be overwritten after loading
Fixes behavior of default values within for-loop sequences
Add Lorentzian model of GaSe, Gaussian model of YAG

2025.47 Jun 2025

Bug fix release:

Corrects the carrier-envelope phase unit on the GUI
Fixes batch size of 1 refusing to run
Fixes a crash when rendering large 2D beam views
Fixes a crash in FDTD mode for large grids and short time lengths
Fixes GUI lock-up when rendering large beam views