Example task for lectures "Computations in Physics" in ITMO University, spring (2015-2017)
Recommended books:
(easy) Understanding the Finite-Difference Time-Domain Method, John B. Schneider, www.eecs.wsu.edu/~schneidj/ufdtd, 2010. (it is also available at GitHub https://github.com/john-b-schneider/uFDTD )
(medium) Numerical electromagnetics : the FDTD method / Umran S. Inan, Robert A. Marshall. 2011
(full) A. Taflove and S. C. Hagness, Computational Electrodynamics: The Finite-Difference Time-Domain Method, 3rd ed. Norwood, MA: Artech House, 2005.
Simulate a system with magnetic mirror boundary condition (H=0) on one side and electric mirror (E= 0) on the other side. The source is a Gaussian profile propagating to boundaries and back, source located exactly in the center of the simulated domain. The successful presentation should provide a sequence of images as a time evolution (or animation) for electric and magnetic fields. The simulation should finish at the moment where the electric field is vanished (all energy is in the magnetic field).
Provide absorbing (Mur ABC) and PML (simplified CPML) boundary condition. Compare ABC with 5,10, and 20 cell PML.
Compare against Fresnel equations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_equations , find the limits of FDTD applicability.
Compare against single dielectric slab (e.g http://www.ece.rutgers.edu/~orfanidi/ewa/ch05.pdf), you should provide simulation of reflection-less cases of a quarter-wavelength and half-wavelength slab width cases.
You can put all the graphical results to "fig" directory, generate-report.py will list all the files in it and generate LaTeX presentation (using Beamer package). After that it should be easy to provide a single file report with all the figures (do not forget to provide reasonable captions to the figures)