Working with polygons

At the core of each pyTDGL simulation is an instance of the tdgl.Device class, which represents the superconducting structure to be modeled. A Device is composed a Layer that lies in a plane parallel to the \(x-y\) plane (at position layer.z0) and has a specified thickness \(d\), coherence length \(\xi\) and London penetration depth \(\lambda\). The layer contains superconducting film, which can contain zero or more holes. Films and holes are represented by instances of the tdgl.Polygon class, which defines a 2D polygonal region.

%config InlineBackend.figure_formats = {"retina", "png"}
%matplotlib inline

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

import tdgl

A Polygon is defined by a collection of (x, y) coordinates specifying its vertices; the vertices are stored as an n x 2 numpy.ndarray called polygon.points.

# Define the initial geometry: a rectangular box specified as an np.ndarray
width, height = 10, 2
points = tdgl.geometry.box(width, height)
print(f"type(points) = {type(points)}, points.shape = {points.shape}")

type(points) = <class 'numpy.ndarray'>, points.shape = (100, 2)

# Create a Polygon representing a "horizontal bar", hbar
hbar = tdgl.Polygon(points=points)
hbar.polygon

The object passed to tdgl.Polygon(points=...) can be of any of the following:

• An n x 2 array-like object, for example an np.ndarray or a list of (x, y) coordinates

• An existing tdgl.Polygon instance (in which case, the new object will be a copy of the existing one)

• An instance of LineString, LinearRing, or Polygon from the shapely package

(
    tdgl.Polygon(points=hbar.points)
    == tdgl.Polygon(points=hbar.polygon)
    == tdgl.Polygon(points=hbar)
    == hbar.copy()
    == hbar
)

True

Every instance of tdgl.Polygon has a property, instance.polygon, which returns a corresponding shapely Polygon object. Among other things, this is usefuly for quickly visualizing polygons.

There are several methods for transforming the geometry of a single Polygon:

• polygon.translate(dx=0, dy=0)

• polygon.rotate(degrees, origin=(0, 0))

• polygon.scale(xfact=1, yfact=1, origin=(0, 0))

• polygon.buffer(distance, ...)

There are also three methods for combining multiple Polygon-like objects:

• polygon.union(*others): logical union of polygon with each object in the iterable others

• See also: tdgl.Polygon.from_union([...])

• polygon.intersection(*others): logical intersection of polygon with each object in the iterable others

• See also: tdgl.Polygon.from_intersection([...])

• polygon.difference(*others): logical difference of polygon with each object in the iterable others

• See also: tdgl.Polygon.from_difference([...])

Note that the elements of the iterable others can be of any type that can be passed in to tdgl.Polygon(points=...) (see above).

# Copy hbar and rotate the copy 90 degrees counterclockwise
vbar = hbar.rotate(90)
vbar.polygon

# Create a new Polygon that is the union of hbar and vbar: "+"
plus = hbar.union(vbar)
# # The above is equivalent to either of the following:
# plus = vbar.union(hbar)
# plus = tdgl.Polygon.from_union([hbar, vbar])
plus.polygon

# Rotate the "+" by 45 degrees to make an "X"
X = plus.rotate(45)
X.polygon

# Create a new polygon with all edges offset (eroded) by a distance of -0.5
thinX = X.buffer(-0.5)
thinX.polygon

# Create a new polygon with all edges offset (expanded) by a distance of 0.5
thickX = X.buffer(0.5)
thickX.polygon

polygons = [hbar, vbar, plus, X, thinX, thickX]
labels = ["hbar", "vbar", "plus", "X", "thinX", "thickX"]

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8, 1.5))

for i, polygon in enumerate(polygons):
    polygon.translate(dx=width * i).plot(ax=ax, linewidth=3)

ax.set_xticks([width * i for i, _ in enumerate(labels)])
ax.set_xticklabels(labels)
_ = ax.set_yticks([])

X.union(plus).polygon

X.intersection(plus).polygon

Using the methods demonstrated above, intricate geometries can be constructed from simple building blocks in just a few lines of code.

size = 10

hbar = tdgl.Polygon(points=tdgl.geometry.box(size / 3, size / 50))
plus = hbar.union(hbar.rotate(90))
star = plus.union(plus.rotate(45))

star_dx = 1.2 * size * np.sqrt(2) / 2

snowflake = (
    tdgl.Polygon(points=tdgl.geometry.box(size, size))
    .rotate(45)
    .union(
        *(star.translate(dx=star_dx).rotate(degrees) for degrees in [0, 90, 180, 270])
    )
)
snowflake = snowflake.union(snowflake.rotate(45))

ax = snowflake.plot()

print(f"Polygon area: snowflake.area = {snowflake.area:.3f}")
print(f"Polygon width and height: snowflake.extents = {snowflake.extents}")

Polygon area: snowflake.area = 136.622
Polygon width and height: snowflake.extents = (20.303896081810475, 20.303896081810475)

Meshing Polygons

Individual polygons can be meshed using the Polygon.make_mesh() method.

setups = [
    dict(min_points=None, smooth=0),
    dict(min_points=600, smooth=0),
    dict(min_points=600, smooth=100),
]

fig, axes = plt.subplots(1, len(setups), figsize=(2 * (len(setups) + 0.5), 2))

for ax, options in zip(axes, setups):
    # Generate a mesh with the specified options
    mesh = X.make_mesh(**options)

    # Plot the mesh
    ax.set_aspect("equal")
    title = [f"{key}={value!r}" for key, value in options.items()]
    title.append(f"Actual points = {mesh.x.shape[0]}")
    ax.triplot(mesh.x, mesh.y, mesh.elements, lw=1)
    ax.set_title("\n".join(title))

Constructing Voronoi polygons: 100%|█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 459/459 [00:00<00:00, 16692.12it/s]
Constructing Voronoi polygons: 100%|█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 603/603 [00:00<00:00, 19070.77it/s]
Constructing Voronoi polygons: 100%|█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 603/603 [00:00<00:00, 18412.14it/s]

tdgl.version_table()

Software	Version
tdgl	0.8.4; git revision 27466d2 [2026-01-19]
Numpy	1.24.3
SciPy	1.10.1
matplotlib	3.7.1
cupy	None
numba	0.57.1
IPython	8.14.0
Python	3.10.11 | packaged by conda-forge | (main, May 10 2023, 19:01:19) [Clang 14.0.6 ]
OS	posix [darwin]
Number of CPUs	Physical: 10, Logical: 10
BLAS Info	OPENBLAS
Mon Jan 19 08:34:12 2026 EST