An improved perfectly matched layer for the eigenmode expansion technique

When performing optical simulations for rotationally symmetric geometries using the eigenmode expansion technique, it is necessary to place the geometry under investigation inside a cylinder with perfectly conducting walls. The parasitic reflections at the boundary of the computational domain can be suppressed by introducing a perfectly matched layer (PML) using e.g. complex coordinate stretching of the cylinder radius. However, the traditional PML suffers from an artificial field divergence limiting its usefulness. We show that the choice of a constant cylinder radius leads to mode profiles with exponentially increasing field amplitudes resulting in numerical instability. As a remedy we propose an improved PML based on a mode-dependent cylinder radius and mode profiles with stable field amplitudes. The new PML formulation eliminates the artificial field divergence and ensures numerical stability.