Time-dependent coupled mode analysis of advanced photonic micro devices

Abstract

Coupled Mode Theory (CMT) is a well-established formalism widely used in the analysis of propagation and interaction of electromagnetic modes in arrays of parallel waveguides, coupled resonator optical waveguides (CROWs), phase-locked arrays of VCSELs etc. So far, CMT analysis considered only situations where both the dielectric function and the input optical signal were assumed to be time-independent. In this work, we extended the CMT analysis to Time-Dependent CMT (TD CMT) in order to include photonic devices with temporal variations of the dielectric function as well as alternating input optical signals. We found TD CMT shows a strong advantage in time and resources consumption over traditional computational techniques in the analysis and design of photonic devices.