Gunupudi, P., Smy, T., Klein, J., Jakubczyk, Z.J., "Self-Consistent Simulation of Opto-Electronic Circuits Using a Modified Nodal Analysis Formulation," Advanced Packaging, IEEE Transactions, Volume: 33 Issue:4, On page(s): 979 - 993
This was my first introduction to optical circuit simulation and the issues involved. It deals with how to properly model optical interference, chirps, dispersion, scattering and thermal dependence of the device. They do this by defining an optical node which is a physical snap shot of a particular place in the system. An optical node is characterized by the mode (which is basically determined by the geometry of the waveguide), direction, polarization, carrier frequency and magnitude/phase of the complex envelope. They had a good discussion on why they chose the magnitude/phase representation rather than real/imaginary which is harder to model in some situations.
Here are some good quotes from the paper:
Electrical and magnetic fields in optical devices are nonconservative unlike their electrical counterparts. As such these fields cannot be represented by variables such as voltages and currents.
These state variables can be used to calculate the total electric field at an optical node at any time-point of interest if so desired. In order to calculate the electric field, the complex envelopes represented by magnitude and phase, for each mode in every channel, are modulated at the carrier frequency and multiplied with their corresponding mode-shapes. These waveforms are summed to obtain the total electric field present at the optical node.
Optical mode overlap integrals are used to determine the coefficients of optical reflection and transmission matrices for these interfaces.
