Linear and nonlinear coupling properties of a novel multicore circular dielectric waveguide

In this work we investigate the linear and nonlinear coupling properties of a novel multicore circular dielectric waveguide. The proposed device consists of a circular central core and many circular sectoral cores at the periphery, while the whole structure can be considered as a nonlinear multicore composite optical coupler. Hybrid guided modes in a circular sectoral dielectric waveguide are derived using circular harmonic expansion for the electromagnetic fields and the Point Matching Method (PMM) for the application of boundary conditions. Several cases are investigated varying some of the parameters of the geometry and the optical frequency in order to produce dispersion diagrams. In advance, the electric and magnetic field distributions for the fundamental guided modes are produced, while linear and nonlinear coupling coefficients as well as the sectoral waveguide mode effective area are derived. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.