Explicit vector beam propagation method for uniaxial poled polymer waveguide devices

For the design and the analysis of integrated optic devices, the beam propagation method (BPM) has been widely used. A vectorial BPM (VBPM) was also developed to simulate the polarization effects and to analyze waveguide structures having large index discontinuities. Recently, the VBPM was extended to treat anisotropic medium by taking the tensorial character of the dielectric constant ε into account. However, this method using implicit numerical analysis is very complex and needs long computing time. To handle three-dimensional uniaxial waveguide devices that consist especially of a poled electro-optic (EO) polymer waveguide, we developed a new VBPM based on an explicit finite difference (EFD) algorithm. This method is straightforward and easy to program. A novel polarization converter that may be implemented by appropriate poling of the EO polymer waveguide is also proposed and analyzed