Planewave expansion methods for photonic crystal fibres (Q1932645)

Plane-wave expansion methods are used for the computation of spectral band gaps and trapped eigenmodes in photonic crystal fibres. The presence of discontinuous coefficients in the governing equation limits the regularities of the eigenfunctions, and, hence, exponential convergence cannot be achieved. It is shown that the error resulting from a plane-wave expansion is of the same order as that due to standard finite element methods. The authors also consider the performance of two variants of the plane-wave expansion method, namely (a) coupling the plane-wave expansion method with a regularisation technique, where the discontinuous coefficients in the governing equation are approximated by smooth functions, and (b) approximating the Fourier coefficients of the discontinuous coefficients in the governing equation. There is no evidence that the regularisation improves the plane-wave expansion method, but with the correct choice of parameters both variants can be used efficiently without adding significant errors.