Download Area for Poisson Superfish

Poisson Superfish is a collection of programs for calculating static magnetic and electric fields and radio-frequency electromagnetic fields in either 2-D Cartesian coordinates or axially symmetric cylindrical coordinates. The programs generate a triangular mesh fitted to the boundaries of different materials in the problem geometry. Plotting programs and other postprocessor codes present the results in various forms.

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The original Poisson Superfish was written by Ron. F. Holsinger in collaboration with Klaus Halbach, who developed the theory. See the paper by K. Halbach and R. F. Holsinger, "SUPERFISH - A Computer Program for Evaluation of RF Cavities with Cylindrical Symmetry", Particle Accelerators 7 (1976) 213-222. Please refer to the Poisson Superfish manual for a brief history of the code development.

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The best way to learn about Poisson Superfish is to run the sample problems described in the documentation (LA-UR-96-1834). We do not recommend trying to build an input file "from scratch." Instead, find an example file that is similar to the problem you are trying to solve. Make a copy of the file and then make any necessary modifications to the geometry and options.

Please acquaint yourself with the documentation in directory LANL\Docs. Start with file SFTOC.DOC, which contains the table of contents and a list of the other documentation files. It is helpful to have a list of the problem variables handy in printed form. For quick reference to the variables used by the codes, open file file SFIntro.DOC installing the codes and print section III.E "Problem Variables."

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The version 7 documentation includes the chapters from the 1987 Reference Manual (LA-UR-87-126) on the physics in the codes. We do not distribute a printed version. The examples include all of the sample problems from the Reference Manual.

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The Poisson Superfish codes have configurable options that you can control with settings in the initialization file SF.INI. The Setup program put a copy of SF.INI containing suggested settings in the installation directory. If you are installing an update, Setup will add new settings to your SF.INI file while preserving your customized settings. The documentation contains detailed information about the configuration parameters.

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The example files provided with this distribution test many features of Poisson Superfish, but your application may exercise a little-used section of the codes. We would appreciate hearing from you if you discover a bug or if you have suggestions for improvements we might make in the codes. We already have added several features suggested by Poisson Superfish users. For suggestions on reporting bugs, open file SFINTRO.DOC in Microsoft Word and click on the TechnicalSupport link near the beginning of the file.

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Subdirectory InputTool contains a graphical input tool for creating Automesh input files. This software was developed by Dickon Jackson when he was at Albacom Ltd., Dundee, Scotland, UK. (He has since moved to Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.) The program includes functions for setting many of the commonly used variables in an Automesh input file as well as geometric shapes and material properties. The author welcomes suggestions and will respond to questions. The author, whose email address is , may add new features and fix reported problems at his convenience.

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Latest Version Number

The latest version number of the code is: 7.20 published on 09/09/2020

Version 7 Installer

Download Installer

Version 7 Log of Changes

See the list of changes, additions, and bug fixes for Poisson Superfish. These changes are listed in reverse chronological order. If you are already a user of a Los Alamos code, you can check back here to see if there have been any updates to the codes after the version you have installed.
Log of Changes

Operating System Support

• Windows: WinXP, Win 2000
• Linux: no native support, works fine under recent versions of Wine (both PC and Mac)
• MacOS: no support

Additional Tools

• Dickon Jackson of the Department of Mathematics at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh has provided some tools for the generation of input into Poisson Superfish. These are the:
  Poisson Superfish Geometric Modeller, Version 3.1 (zip archive) and View Graph, Version 1.0 (zip archive). A log of the changes can be found here.

• We now provide files for several language systems that allow users to call the Poisson Superfish field interpolator from their own programs via a Windows dynamic link library (DLL). The supported languages are:

  • Absoft Fortran version 8.0 and later.
  • Borland C++, version 5.0 and later (also works with Borland C).
  • Borland Delphi, version 2.0 and later.
  • Lahey Fortran 90, version 2.01 and later.
  • Lahey/Fujitsu Fortran 95 (5.0 and later)
  • Microsoft Visual C++, version 2.0 and later.
  • Microsoft Visual Basic, version 4.0 and later.

  Many Fortran compilers support linking with object modules made with one or more of these C languages, which provides a way for your Fortran code to call the DLL. The DLL for each language system appears in its own directory. The directory contains a dynamic link library (DLL), the object module used to create the DLL, an import library, and (if available) an example main program that calls the DLL. We continue to provide source files and a Fortran library for users of Lahey/Fujitsu Fortran 95 (version 5.7).

  Download Link for the ZIP archive.

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To download Poisson Superfish, we ask that you register as a user. If you did not register during the download step please use the form below. Registered users receive notification by email of new features and bug fixes.

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