MeepSAT: MEEP Simulation and Analysis for Telescopes 🔭

Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) telescopes observe the sky in a wavelength of roughly 10 to 1 mm, making systematics due to optical interactions from the different components of the telescope a key factor to address. We introduce a publicly available FDTD simulation code for CMB Telescopes "MeepSAT" (MEEP Simulation and Analysis for Telescopes). MeepSAT is primarily based on the FDTD code MEEP and the main goal of MeepSAT is to help the CMB community with the design and characterization of current and future generation telescopes by acting as a complementing method to the existing methods such Physical Optics, Geometrical Optics and Method-of-Moment. These FDTD simulation help to probe the systematic effects of the various instruments of the telescope that's difficult to characterise using the existing industry-standard softwares. These features includes complex geometries (absorbers, anti-reflection coatings), deformations of different components due to thermal variation, detector loading due to specular reflections etc. With the help of MeepSAT, we mainly intend to shed light on the optical systematics leading to detector loading and optical ghosting in CMB Telescopes. This repository contains various modules of MeepSAT for initializing, running, and analyzing 2D simulations, as well as visualizing the results.