Prof. James B. Cole

Currently I am a professor at the University of Tsukuba in Japan.

I graduated from the University of Maryland, PhD physics (high energy and particle physics), and after a post-doctorate at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics) I went to the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) , and then the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). At ARL I developed simulated annealing programs for pattern recognition, and at NRL I began my current research.

My main research is to develop high precision numerical algorithms to simulate light propagation in complicated structures with subwavelength features, such as photonic crystals. I specialize in the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. Using what are called nonstandard (NS) finite difference (FD) models I have succeeded in greatly increasing the accuracy of FDTD on a coarse numerical grid.

My main focus is to develop high precision algorithms with good numerical stability on coarse numerical grids, but which are simple enough to run on small computers.