Fiber: Fiber-Optic Modeling software to be released by the end of 2000

Fiber: A software package for calculating the complex modes of electromagnetic wave propagation in circular fibers of arbitrary index profiles will be released sometime by the end of year 2000. This on-going work is an extension of similar work (MODIEG) done for plane-layered dielectric slab waveguides. The complex mathematical description and it's analytic formulation allows for any number of guiding and non-guiding circular layers of varied thickness with different gain or attenuation in each layer of the fiber. Field distributions of all bounded, unbounded, leaky or radiative modes having complex propagation constants is calculated. A 4x4 matrix representation comprised of bessel function of the field equations constitutes the characteristic equation matrix which is independent of the complexity of any particular structure's index profile. A general root finding algorithm is used to find the eigen values (propagation constants). The computer program is being written in C with user interface to be designed in C++. An effort has been made to use efficient but accurate numerical methods algorithms.