Effective and flexible analysis for propagation in time varying waveguides

The equivalence between the propagation of dispersive modal fields in two-dimensional waveguides, and plane waves in a one-dimensional plasma is presented. Exploitation of this equivalence allows a time domain variant of the effective index approach to be used to model dispersive waveguides problems very efficiently. A time domain integral equation is developed for this important practical case and the stability of a computer algorithm based upon it is improved by means of both a semi-implicit formulation and the use of a modified space–time mesh.