Determination of Optical Waveguide Refractive-Index Profiles with the Inverse Analytic Transfer Matrix Method

In this paper, we present an inverse analytic transfer matrix (IATM) method to predict the refractive index profiles from the measurement of mode indices based on the analytic transfer matrix (ATM) method, which can exactly determine the modal characteristics of a planar optical waveguide with arbitrary index profiles. IATM method has been proved to be universally reliable not only in slowly changing profiles but also the profiles changing rapidly in which inverse WKB method would find difficult through numerical analysis for several typical refractive index profiles.