The method of optical paths for the numerical solution of integrated photonics problems

A number of topical problems of integrated photonics are reduced to oblique incidence of radiation on a plane-parallel scatterer. For such problems, a method for integrating Maxwell’s equations along the direction of beam propagation is proposed. As a result, the original two-dimensional problem is reduced to a one-dimensional problem, and it is solved using recently proposed one-dimensional bicompact schemes. This significantly reduces the computational cost compared with the conventional two-dimensional finite difference and finite element methods. The proposed method is verified by solving test problems for which exact solutions are known.