Stability of the modal solutions for nonlinear optical waveguides using the finite element method

The propagation of light through nonlinear waveguides has stimulated considerable interest. These devices are capable of exhibiting a wide range of complex but very useful phenomena such as soliton emission and photonic switching. Over the last decade there have been many theoretical studies to understand the lightwave propagation through such nonlinear optical waveguides and amongst them the semi-analytical techniques, the beam propagation method and the finite element method can be mentioned. The salient question is whether these wave solutions are stable on propagation and this has been studied recently. In this paper we present for the first time a stability study of consistent modal solutions obtained by using the finite element method.