A NUMERICAL TECHNIQUE FOR THE DETERMINATION OF THE PROPAGATION CHARACTERISTICS OF NONLINEAR PLANAR OPTICAL WAVE-GUIDES

A numerical method is proposed and implemented into computer code for the analysis of propagation characteristics of nonlinear optical waveg uides. This technique follows the concept of the shooting method, and the fourth-order Runge-Kutta method is adapted to integrate the differ ential wave equation from one side to the other. An error function [13 ] is defined to estimate the discrepency between the computed and expe cted boundary values. A secant method is then used to evaluate the sig n and magnitude of the correction term for the initial guesses of effe ctive index. This procedure is performed in an iterative manner until the error reduces to a specified range. Experiments show that very acc urate results can be obtained through this method, and only six to sev en iterations are needed for solutions to converge. With this method w e analyze nonlinear waveguides with varying guide parameters for reali zation of their behavior. All the findings and results can be used in further investigations of optical devices composed of waveguide struct ures.