Modeling of photonic crystal optical fibers with finite elements

The photonic crystal structures have given rise to innovative techniques to build optical fibers. This paper presents finite element magnetic and electric field models for determining the propagation modes in dielectric waveguides. A combination of edge elements for the transverse field and nodal elements for the longitudinal field is used together with a geometric transformation to cope with the open domain. The model is applied to the study of photonic crystal fiber structure. The case of leaky modes is also discussed.