General Treatment of Slab Waveguides Including Lossy Materials and Arbitrary Refractive Index Profiles

Abstract

The determination of the characteristics of multilayer waveguides, a necessity to construct integrated optical elements, is reported in detail, based on the matrix formalism for the description of light propagation in layered structures. Complex refractive indices are included aS well as arbitrary index profiles, for which an approximation method is reported. Many applications of the formalism, describing different slab waveguide configurations and optical elements demonstrate its variability.