A full vectorial generalized discontinuous Galerkin beam propagation method (GDG-BPM) for nonsmooth electromagnetic fields in waveguides (Q934116)

The beam propagation method (BPM) is an approximation of the time harmonic Maxwell equations for simulating the propagation of light in slowly varying optical waveguides. The resulting equation involves only first order derivatives (a consequence of the slow envelop assumption) of the paraxial coordinate and the resolution for this coordinate can be much coarser then for standard methods. In the present paper, the authors generalize the method to handle wave guides with several layers of material with different electric and magnetic properties, for example, when the core and cladding consist of different materials. At the material interfaces, both the electric and magnetic fields satisfy jump conditions which motivates the use of a discontinuous Galerkin method. Four different discrete formulations are derived: two based on discretization of the electric field and two of the magnetic. For one of each variant a divergence condition is enforced exactly. The method is tested for a few test cases and the convergence with respect to the order of discontinuous Galerkin approximation is studied.