A Vectorial Envelope Maxwell Formulation for Electromagnetic Waveguides with Application to Nonlinear Fiber Optics

Abstract: This article presents an ultraweak discontinuous Petrov-Galerkin (DPG) formulation of the time-harmonic Maxwell equations for the vectorial envelope of the electromagnetic field in a weakly-guiding multi-mode fiber waveguide. This formulation is derived using an envelope ansatz for the vector-valued electric and magnetic field components, factoring out an oscillatory term of $exp(-i \mathsf{k}z)$ with a user-defined wavenumber $\mathsf{k}$, where $z$ is the longitudinal fiber axis and field propagation direction. The resulting formulation is a modified system of the time-harmonic Maxwell equations for the vectorial envelope of the propagating field. This envelope is less oscillatory in the $z$-direction than the original field, so that it can be more efficiently discretized and computed, enabling solution of the vectorial DPG Maxwell system for $1000\times$ longer fibers than previously possible. Different approaches for incorporating a perfectly matched layer for absorbing the outgoing wave modes at the fiber end are derived and compared numerically. The resulting formulation is used to solve a 3D Maxwell model of an ytterbium-doped active gain fiber amplifier, coupled with the heat equation for including thermal effects. The nonlinear model is then used to simulate thermally-induced transverse mode instability (TMI). The numerical experiments demonstrate that it is computationally feasible to perform simulations and analysis of real-length optical fiber laser amplifiers using discretizations of the full vectorial time-harmonic Maxwell equations. The approach promises a new high-fidelity methodology for analyzing TMI in high-power fiber laser systems and is extendable to including other nonlinearities.