Subpixel smoothing for dispersive materials

[smartalecH]

I saw a cool snippet in one of the release notes:

tidy3d/CHANGELOG.md

Line 689 in 10ca408

- Improvements to subpixel averaging for dispersive materials.

Does this mean that Tidy3D supports second-order accurate, subpixel smoothing for arbitrary materials (e.g. dispersive)? Or is this implying that the material lorentzians are simply being averaged (i.e. first-order accurate)?

Either way, very cool!

[momchil-flex]

I can't disclose what we're doing exactly, but it's not second-order accurate unfortunately. Also we don't support subpixel for metals right now as it seems quite nontrivial to come up with something that makes sense (and is also stable...). Would be interested if you have suggestions!

[smartalecH]

Thanks @momchil-flex! I agree it's a tough problem. Unfortunately I don't have any solutions either... but I appreciate you sharing!

[momchil-flex]

By makes sense I mean actually improves accuracy as opposed to randomly changing the result...