Applying Beam Propagation Method
The Beam Propagation Method (BPM) is a popular simulation technique for evaluating the evolution of optical fields in waveguides and photonic devices. It takes advantage of the fact that light in such devices predominantly propagates along a particular direction, e.g., the axis of a fiber. As a result BPM can efficiently simulate light propagation in large structures that extend over many thousand wavelengths.
Explore the award-winning software BeamLab when simulating optical devices and waveguides in your familiar MATLAB® environment. With a steadily growing library of easy-to-use functions, it is highly flexible in waveguide and input field design. It has extensive post-processing possibilities and visualization options for generating videos and print-ready plots. Besides, it can also take advantage of the MATLAB® Parallel Computing Toolbox™ to solve parameter sweeps and optimization problems in a quick and convenient way using multicore processors and computer clusters.1
The following example shows beam propagation in one core of a vanishing-core photonic lantern. At the input end the device consists of 6 cores surrounded by an inner and outer cladding. This structure is then tapered down to a multimode fiber. Here the inner and outer cladding of the photonic lantern take over the role of the core and cladding of the multimode fiber at the output end.
![](https://www.codeseeder.com/wp-content/uploads/photonic_lantern_index_3d.png)
![](https://www.codeseeder.com/wp-content/uploads/photonic_lantern_slices_xy_stacked.png)
Example of a BPM simulation in a vanishing-core photonic lantern with BeamLab’s Beam Propagation Toolbox
- Requires MATLAB® Parallel Computing Toolbox™.