Abstract: | Some well-known results obtained by Brekhovskikh, Felsen, Tindle, Guthrie, and other authors during their studies of the interrelation between modes and rays in a plane-layered waveguide are briefly discussed. The relationships that extend these results to the case of a waveguide with large-scale inhomogeneities of the refractive index are analyzed. It is shown that in the presence of inhomogeneities, the groups of the constructively interfering modes, as in the case of a plane-layered waveguide, also form contributions of individual rays. In this case, fluctuations of the amplitudes of normal modes can be described by simple ray formulas, which are the mode analogs of the relationships of geometric optics and the smooth perturbation method.Institute of Applied Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Nizhny Novgorod. Translated from Izvestiya Vysshikh Uchebnykh Zavedenii, Radiofizika, Vol. 38, Nos. 1–2, pp. 115–121, January–February, 1995. |