In the, relatively, recent fields of nanophotonics and especially plasmonics and metamaterials the theoretical approaches and their related numerical techniques (mainly based on the solution of Maxwell's equations) play an extremely important role. Indeed, a major part of published papers focus on the numerical simulations when exploring plasmonic/metamaterials/metasurfaces configurations, which is a key step towards design and experimental fulfillment. Generally, one can split computational methods in electromagnetism into two major families: (i) the family of global methods, like the FDTD or the FEM, able to handle a large variety of problems but at the coast of large computation times and memory requirements; and (ii) the family of home specific methods especially designed for certain geometries and exploiting the peculiarities (periodicity, symmetries…). Among the latter family one can find some methods tailored for diffraction gratins such as the Fourier Modal Method (and many others) that proved to be very versatile and efficient in terms of computational time and memory requirements.

Our aim in organizing this session in PIERS-2023 is to gather specialists of computational electromagnetics, who are (or have been) developing such subtle and efficient approaches, in order to discuss the state of the art in the matter and especially focus on the new problems raised by the difficulties to simulate new nanophotonics and nano-electromechanical devices. The session is open to other modeling approaches in nanophotonics or in other spectral ranges and relying on global methods.

We believe that such a session could be of great interest not only to theoreticians/numericians working on specific computational methods in electromagnetism but also to those (experimentalists/designers) who are interested by applying them to nanophotonics.