Coordinate stretching for finite difference optical waveguide mode solvers

Numerical methods are necessary to calculate propagating modes in optical waveguides. The finite difference method is widely used because it is applicable to waveguides with arbitrary refractive index profiles and it is easy to implement. To improve the efficiency and to reduce the size of the resulting large sparse matrix, the finite difference method is often used with a variable grid size strategy. This is related to the technique of coordinate stretching. In this paper, we develop a technique for optimizing the coordinate stretching function based on discrete reflection coefficients. We demonstrate our method using a scalar model which is valid for weakly guided optical waveguides.