2.1 Mode Profile of the HE11 mode as a function of V (Movie)

Figure 3: A frame taken from an animation showing the cross-sectional energy flow for the HE11 mode for varying values of V on the left, and the position of V on the dispersion plot on the right.

Figure 4: Another frame taken from the same animation as Figure 3.

Here we examine the cross-sectional energy flow for the HE11 mode in a 3-layer step index fibre. The core-cladding interface and the cladding-jacket interface are indicated in the above plots by thin magenta rings. A visualisation was produced to show how this energy flow varies with the wavelength (or V) of the light in the fibre. This was done by using the time dimension to represent the varying wavelength. The context in this animation was provided by tracing the current V value on a dispersion plot. This technique is especially useful since the data is not uniformly distributed in . This animation can be found at http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~audrey/sv3/project/HE11data-flat.mov.

Figure 5: A frame taken from an animation similar to 3, but instead representing the cross-sectional Energy Flow as a 3-D surface.

Figure 6: Another frame taken from the same animation as Figure 5.

These animations are very similar to previous but instead they show the energy flow as a 3-d surface. This was done because the colour scale (colour bar) in the first animation was not constant over various frames. Thus the maximum red regions have very different values in different frames. Representing the energy flow by both colour and height avoids this confusion. In addition, it was found that forcing the colour scale to be constant is not effective because there exists an order of magnitude difference in data values between frames. This animation can be found at http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~audrey/sv3/project/HE11data-peak.mov.

It is interesting to note that both animations show that the energy flow of the HE11 mode becomes confined to the core of the fibre as increases or wavelength decreases. In addition, the viewer notices a ``pinhole'' in the centre () of the energy profile in Figure 3. This is because the data file did not contain the position or the corresponding field values (see Section 1.1). Although this gives the viewer the impression that the field is not defined at , this is actually not true, and is a result of the way the data was generated.