[4] He coined the descriptors "finite difference time domain" and "FDTD" in the 1980 paper, "Application of the finite-difference time-domain method to sinusoidal steady-state electromagnetic penetration problems.

His OSA Fellow citation reads: "For creating the finite-difference time-domain method for the numerical solution of Maxwell's equations, with crucial application to the growth and current state of the field of photonics."

Current FDTD modeling applications range from near-DC (ultralow-frequency geophysics involving the entire Earth-ionosphere waveguide) through microwaves (radar signature technology, antennas, wireless communications devices, digital interconnects, biomedical imaging/treatment) to visible light (photonic crystals, nanoplasmonics, solitons, microscopy and lithography, and biophotonics).

In 2013, Taflove and Ardavan Oskooi of Kyoto University and Steven G. Johnson of MIT edited the research monograph, Advances in FDTD Computational Electrodynamics: Photonics and Nanotechnology.

The descriptors "finite difference time domain" and "FDTD" coined by Taflove in 1980 have since become widely used, having appeared in this exact form in approximately 140,000 and 250,000 Google Scholar search results, respectively, as of Aug. 21, 2020.

Beginning in 2003, Taflove had collaborated with Vadim Backman of Northwestern University's Biomedical Engineering Department in research aimed at the minimally invasive detection of early-stage human cancers of the colon, pancreas, lung, and ovaries.

The techniques being pursued are based upon a spectroscopic microscopy analysis of light backscattered from histologically normal tissue located away from a neoplastic lesion in what has been termed the field effect.

On May 5, 2008, a large collaboration headed by Backman (with Taflove as a co-investigator) was awarded a five-year, $7.5-million grant from the National Institutes of Health to pursue this biophotonics technology to develop a noninvasive test for population-wide colon cancer screening.

The latter paper rigorously shows that spectroscopic microscopy permits determining the nature of deeply subdiffraction three-dimensional refractive-index fluctuations of a linear, label-free dielectric medium in the far zone.