Beam-propagation analysis of loss in bent optical waveguides and fibers

We demonstrate that the beam-propagation method can be used to calculate accurately both the pure bending loss and the transition loss of bent single-mode optical waveguides and fibers. Our results allow us to establish the accuracy of several commonly used theories of bending loss and to investigate the degree to which theories of step-index monomode fiber losses can be used to predict the losses of graded-index monomode fibers.