Recent advances in the field of guided-wave optics, such as fiber optics
and integrated optics, have included the introduction of
arbitrarily-shaped optical waveguides which, in many cases, also
happened to be arbitrarily inhomogeneous, dissipative, anisotropic,
and/or nonlinear. Most of such cases of waveguide arbitrariness do not
lend themselves to analytical so- lutions; hence, computational tools
for modeling and simulation are es- sential for successful design,
optimization, and realization of the optical waveguides. For this
purpose, various numerical techniques have been de- veloped. In
particular, the finite element method (FEM) is a powerful and efficient
tool for the most general (i. e., arbitrarily-shaped, inhomogeneous,
dissipative, anisotropic, and nonlinear) optical waveguide problem. Its
use in industry and research is extensive, and indeed it could be said
that with- out it many optical waveguide problems would be incapable of
solution. This book is intended for students, engineers, designers, and
techni- cal managers interested in a detailed description of the FEM for
optical waveguide analysis. Starting from a brief review of
electromagnetic theory, the first chapter provides the concepts of the
FEM and its fundamentals. In addition to conventional elements, i. e.,
line elements, triangular elements, tetrahedral elements, ring elements,
and triangular ring elements which are utilized for one-dimensional,
two-dimensional, three-dimensional, axisymmetric two- dimensional, and
axisymmetric three-dimensional problems, respectively, special-purpose
elements, such as isoparametric elements, edge elements, infinite
elements, and boundary elements, are also introduced.
