Propagation of waves in a cylindrical liquid crystal optical fiber

We describe analytically the propagation of optical fields in a cylindrical nematic liquid crystal cored waveguide. In the limit of low incident beam energy we calculate-the ray trajectories, the cutoff frequency, the maximum number of modes and the propagation constant of the field distributions, f or a core with positive dielectric anisotropy (cyanobiphenil). We first com pare our calculated values of the propagation constants with recent numeric al estimations and show that the agreement is excellent within an error of 0.8%. The field distributions are also compared and we find that the differ ences between both approaches are larger. We discuss what we belive are the reasons for this discrepancies and comment on the advantanges and limitati ons of our precedure.