General coupled mode theory in non-Hermitian waveguides.

Abstract

In the presence of loss and gain, the coupled mode equation on describing the mode hybridization of various waveguides or cavities, or cavities coupled to waveguides becomes intrinsically non-Hermitian. In such non-Hermitian waveguides, the standard coupled mode theory fails. We generalize the coupled mode theory with a properly defined inner product based on reaction conservation. We apply our theory to the non-Hermitian parity-time symmetric waveguides, and obtain excellent agreement with results obtained by finite element fullwave simulations. The theory presented here is typically formulated in space to study coupling between waveguides, which can be transformed into time domain by proper reformulation to study coupling between non-Hermitian resonators. Our theory has the strength of studying non-Hermitian optical systems with inclusion of the full vector fields, thus is useful to study and design non-Hermitian devices that support asymmetric and even nonreciprocal light propagations.