Papers › Coupled-mode theory for astrophotonics
Coupled-mode theory for astrophotonics
Jonathan Lin
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Coupled-mode theory (CMT) is a powerful tool for simulating near-harmonic systems. In telecommunications, variations of the theory have been used extensively to study waveguides, both analytically and through numerical modelling. Analogous mathematical techniques to the CMT are also widely used in quantum mechanics. The purpose of this work is to collect different formulations of the CMT and their underlying connections to quantum mechanical techniques, and to showcase their utility in modelling slowly varying waveguides including directional couplers and photonic lanterns. My choice of example waveguides is motivated by the astronomical applications of such devices in starlight nulling, wavefront sensing, and high-resolution spectroscopy. I first provide a brief review of the standard form of the CMT, applicable for waveguides with fixed eigenmodes. Next, I show that the CMT also applies for slowly varying waveguides, and demonstrate the close relation between the CMT and several well-known approximation methods from quantum mechanics, as well as concepts like geometric phase. Finally, I present a verification of my analysis, in the form of the numerical package cbeam.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections