Finite element beam propagation method for anisotropic optical waveguides

A finite element beam propagation method (BPM) for anisotropic optical waveguides is newly formulated. In order to treat a wide-angle beam propagation, a Pade approximant operator is employed and to avoid nonphysical reflection from computational window edges, a transparent boundary condition is extended to anisotropic materials. To show the validity and usefulness of this approach, the numerical results for an anisotropic planar waveguide and a magnetooptic channel waveguide are presented.