PROPAGATION IN SOL-GEL CHANNEL WAVE-GUIDES - NUMERICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL APPROACHES

We describe various structures of channel waveguides made through the sol-gel process and present numerical simulations to study and optimiz e the geometrical and physical parameters. The computations give the g uiding modes and their field profiles for a set of values. By comparis on with experimental observations, an analysis of parameters such as t he depth of the waveguides and the refractive index is performed, and parameters for an optimized structure are established. (C) 1998 Societ y of Photo-Optical instrumentation Engineers.