HERMITE-GAUSS FUNCTIONS IN THE ANALYSIS OF A CATEGORY OF OPTICAL-DEVICES

It is shown in this paper that the Hermite-Gauss functions may be syst ematically used in an eigenfunction expansion procedure to solve for f ield propagation characteristics in the devices of interest. This quas i-analytic approach, coupled with the naturally suited collocation num erical procedure, is demonstrated to be a very efficient and effective scheme for analysing optical fields in non-uniform, inhomogeneous med ia. It is proposed as a method. of solution for active semiconductor o ptical devices where it is also necessary to calculate the optical fie ld in conjunction with the diffusion-dominated carrier density equatio n. Self-consistent solutions are normally obtained only after several iterations, hence the need to achieve an efficient computation scheme is paramount.