Introduction to Optical Waveguides

This chapter presents an introduction to the optical waveguides including planar and nonplanar structures. Additionally, an analysis of planner waveguides based on ray-optical approach and Maxwell’s equations approach is investigated. In this context, types of modes, dispersion, cutoff frequency, and effective thickness of the optical waveguides are discussed thoroughly. Further, the different numerical techniques and their based mode solvers which are used to analyze optical waveguides are summarized in brief. Finally, the coupling mechanisms to the optical waveguide are introduced including transversal coupling techniques and the longitudinal coupling techniques.