Analysis Methods for Optical Guided-Wave Propagation

Abstract

This paper reviews the methods of numerical analysis of optical guided-wave propagation, placing emphasis on a beam propagation method (BPM), a finite-difference method (FDM), and a finite-element method (FEM). Among these methods BPM is most widely used to investigate the field propagation in integrated optics, but unfortunately often requires considerable computation time. Recently there has been a great deal of reserach to improve the computational efficiency of BPM. FDM and FEM can be much more efficient than the conventional BPM. FEM can be applied both to TE (transverse electric) and TM (transverse magnetic) mode equations.