materials.md

Using optical materials

As discussed, almost all optical components (except ideal ones) consist of one or more materials. Often for simulations, several material parameters must be known. Since the same material data is shared between different nodes, an infrastructue for handling material parameters is needed. A simple approch could be a text file.

Preferable however is a database which would also allow for shared access between different users from a central server. A common materials database would thus reduce the effort for adding new materials. A draft of the database layout could be as follows:

This structure allows for an arbitrary number of material parameters to be added with a strictly defined data format. Let's describe the structure in detail:

Table: materials

This is the central table storing the materials with their name and a reference to a material type (see next section). The actual data table (materialdata) refers to this table for assigning a property(value) to a certain material.

Table: materialtypes

This is simple table storing different material types such as "glass", "metal", "gas", "crystal" etc. The purpose is simply to provide a filter to all materials while browsing a (possible) long list of materials. Each material refers to an entry of this table. This means the material belongs to a certain material type.

Table: properties

This table defines the property names such as "refractive index" or "manufacturer" together with a description field. These properties are connected with one ore more data types (see next section) which represent the property value type.

Table: datatypes

The data type defines the way the value of a property is represented. This could be a value such "numeric", "string", "2dData" etc. This information defines how the actual data fields (defined in materialdata) have to be interpreted or parsed.

Table: datasources

This table stores information about where the data was taken from (website, info from manufacturer, own measurement, etc...)

Table: proptypes

This is the connecting table for relating a given property to a set of datatypes.

Table: materialdata

This table stores the actual material properties.

Materialdb software

As a first project the materialdb software has been developed. This software consists of a backend and a frontend part.

The backend is written in rust using the seaorm package for database handling as well as the rocket web framework for the development of a web API. Furthermore, this crate also contains basic functions for accessing the database (read-only so far) from the node system to be devloped. For viewing / editing the database a frontend package written in Angular was developed.