Stability analysis of FD-BPM applied in high power semiconductor laser models

Abstract

We perform a stability analysis of the Crank-Nicolson based finite difference beam propagation algorithm for a medium with a complex refractive index distribution. We use typical waveguide parameters that correspond to an InGaAs–AlGaAs epitaxy. The results show that selecting the fundamental mode propagation constant as the BPM reference value, even though it allows reducing the errors, makes the FD-BPM scheme unstable when attempting to retrace the propagation.