ADDA (pronounced /ˈɑddɑ/) is a C software package (console application) to calculate scattering and absorption of electromagnetic waves by particles of arbitrary shape and composition using the discrete dipole approximation (DDA). The particles can be located in a homogeneous medium or near a plane substrate; emission (decay-rate) enhancement of point emitters can also be calculated. The main feature of ADDA is the ability to run on a multiprocessor system or multicore processors (parallelizing a single DDA simulation). It can also employ modern GPUs to accelerate computations. ADDA is intended to be a versatile tool, suitable for a wide variety of applications ranging from interstellar dust and atmospheric aerosols to metallic nanoparticles and biological cells. Its applicability is limited only by available computer resources.
ADDA originated at the University of Amsterdam but has then evolved into an open-source international project. It is used in about 30 countries, including 7 out of top 12 universities (according to THE World University Rankings 2023). Corresponding papers have been published in Science, Nature Photonics, and Nature Nanotechnology, among many other journals. We recommend to start with one of the following:
- Getting started (wikis)
- Java-based GUI
- Manual
- FAQ
- Features
- Releases/Downloads (source code and 64-bit Windows executables)
- Compiling ADDA
If you choose to use ADDA, please subscribe to announcement mailing list; "registered" users of ADDA will be notified when updates to the code are made. If you publish results obtained using ADDA, you should acknowledge the source of the code. The general reference is – Yurkin M.A. and Hoekstra A.G. The discrete-dipole-approximation code ADDA: capabilities and known limitations, J. Quant. Spectrosc. Radiat. Transfer 112, 2234–2247 (2011). Please also look at a list of more specific references.
We encourage users to provide feedback in any possible way. If you have any questions, please write to the discussion group. If you have any suggestions or a bug report, submit it directly to the issue tracker, taking advantage of the open development process. Please also provide feedback on the existing issues – you may upvote issues that you find important (GitHub account is required) and/or provide some meaningful comments.
.github/– GitHub-related settingsdevtools/– tools used by ADDA developersdoc/– documentationexamples/– examples of using ADDAinput/– default input filesmisc/– additional tools, relatively independent from the main part of ADDAsample/– sample output and other filessrc/– source files and makefilestests/– various tests to make the development of ADDA more robustwin64/– executables for 64-bit (x86_64) WindowsLICENSE– GNU General Public License v3.0