Current sources bound modes

In the previous chapter we examined the excitation of modes of a fiber by illumination of the endface with beams and diffuse sources, i.e. by sources external to the fiber. Here we investigate the power of bound modes and the power radiated due to current sources distributed within the fiber, as shown in Fig. 21-1. Our interest in such problems is mainly motivated by the following chapter, where we show that fiber nonuniformities can be modelled by current sources radiating within the uniform fiber. Thus, isolated nonuniformities radiate like current dipoles and surface roughness, which occurs at the core-cladding interface, can be modelled by a tubular current source. 

The current sources in Fig. 21-1 launch power into bound modes, and thus specify the modal amplitudes. Expressions for these amplitudes are derived from Maxwell s equations in Chapter 31. We find from Eqs. (31-35) and... 

The tubular current source was described in Section 21-6, where we showed that it is ineffective in exciting bound modes unless either of the resonance conditions of Eq. (21-15) is satisfied. A similar conclusion holds for the radiation fields. If the tube length 2L is large compared to the spatial period 2n/Sl, where 2 is the frequency in Eq. (21-13), it is intuitive that power will be radiated essentially at a fixed angle to the fiber axis. This is also a consequence of Floquets theorem [7]. However, unlike the current dipole, radiation now depends on the orientation of the currents on the tube. 

When light propagates along a fiber and impinges on nonuniformities due to imperfections in the fiber, some of its power is scattered, as shown schematically in Fig. 22-1 (a). Part of the scattered power is distributed into forward-and backward-propagating modes, while the remainder is radiated. For multimode fibers, the distribution of scattered power is best treated by the ray methods of Chapter 5. Here we are primarily interested in fibers that propagate only one or a few modes. We treat the nonuniformities of the perturbed fiber as induced current sources within the unperturbed fiber. The results of the previous chapter can then be used to describe excitation of bound modes and the radiation field [1-3]. 

As we now have orthogonality relations and normalization expressions for leaky modes, results which were derived for bound modes in earlier chapters can simply be extended to apply to leaky modes. These include the perturbation expressions of Chapter 18, the modal amplitudes due to illumination in Chapter 20, and the excitation and scattering effects of current sources in Chapters 21 to 23. We give an example of leaky-mode excitation by a source in Section 24—23. 

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