WKB approach for structured waveguides

TL;DR

This paper introduces a WKB-like approximate method for analyzing electromagnetic fields in structured waveguides, enabling simpler phase analysis with about 1% accuracy in sections with group velocity gradients.

Contribution

It develops a novel WKB-analogue approach for structured waveguides that separates forward and backward fields, simplifying analysis and improving computational efficiency.

Findings

Approximate method achieves about 1% accuracy in relevant sections.

The approach effectively separates forward and backward wave components.

Comparison with exact solutions validates the method's precision.

Abstract

The results of the development of an approximate approach, which can be considered as an analogue of the WKB method, are presented. This approach gives possibility to divide the electromagnetic field in structured waveguides into forward and backward components and simplify the analysis of the field characteristics, especially the phase distribution. The accuracy of this method was estimated by comparing the solution of the approximate system of equations with the solution of the general system of equations. For this, a special code was written that combines the proposed approach with the more accurate one developed earlier. The results of this comparison showed that the accuracy of the proposed approximate approach for sections with group velocity gradients, similar to the SLAC section, is about 1%.