Numerical Separation of Vector Wave Equation in a 2-D Doubly Connected Domain

In this paper, we present an efficient numerical algorithm to solve the vector wave equation in general cylindrically layered media. The method is based on the fact that appropriate choices of basis and weighting functions make it possible to separate the vector wave equation numerically. To this end, we present a set of curl-conforming vector basis functions in a 2-D doubly connected domain and another set of different vector weighting functions. The former is responsible for the avoidance of spurious solutions while the later provides a numerical separation. The proposed method is applied to calculate the propagation constants of the lower order guided and leaky modes of several cylindrically layered dielectric waveguides and the accuracy and efficiency of the method are investigated.