FULL VECTORIAL SIMULATION FOR CHARACTERIZING LOSS OR GAIN IN OPTICAL-DEVICES WITH AN ACCURATE AND AUTOMATED FINITE-ELEMENT PROGRAM

An efficient, accurate, and automated vectorial finite-element method is described to characterize arbitrarily shaped optical devices having loss or gain properties. The method can be easily implemented inside the PDE2D software environment, where an interactive session allows th e user to specify the problem in a easy-to-use format. For the method to be validated, modal dispersion characteristics of high loss metal-c oated optical fibers that have recently been used in applications in s canning near-field optical microscopy are presented and compared with results obtained with two vectorial approaches, i.e., the field expans ion and the multiple-multipole methods. These results clearly illustra te the flexibility, accuracy, and ease of implementation of the method . (C) 1997 Optical Society of America.