Optical Waveguide Power Dividers.

The patent application provides an optical waveguide power divider which uses a two-dimensional slab waveguide. An input confined to one arm propagates to a point where synchronism between two closely adjacent guides is abruptly introduced. The coupled guides are sufficiently synchronous and close together that the symmetrical and asymmetrical normal modes of the coupled structure will be excited, each with 12 of the input power. Synchronism is then slowly removed by tapering the overlay to zero so that mode a selects arm number 1 while mode b selects arm number 2. These changes are slow enough that there is no mode conversion between modes a and b. After synchronism has been removed, the two arms may be spatially separated to split the power into two directions.