A robust and efficient method to calculate electromagnetic modes on a cylindrical step-index nanofibre

Abstract

The accurate calculation of guided electromagnetic modes in optical nanofibres is critical for applications in nanophotonics, from quantum interfaces to vectorial light sensing. Standard textbook methods rely on solving a $4\times4$ matrix eigenvalue problem to find the modal fields. While widely used, this approach has a subtle but significant flaw: the final determination of the field amplitudes requires finding the numerical null space of a theoretically singular matrix, an ill-conditioned problem that introduces large relative errors in the small but physically crucial longitudinal field components. In this work, we introduce a fundamentally more robust and efficient semi-analytical method. By starting from the foundational symmetries of the cylindrical waveguide and employing a judicious normalisation of the field amplitudes, we demonstrate that the problem can be analytically reduced to a much simpler $2\times2$ system. This reformulation yields two decisive advantages: the dispersion relation is obtained numerically from a simple and well-behaved transcendental equation, and more importantly, the modal field amplitudes are subsequently determined \emph{analytically}. Our approach completely bypasses the numerical null space calculation, thereby ensuring the accuracy of the full vectorial field structure. This method provides a powerful and reliable tool for the design and analysis of nanofibre-based devices, particularly for applications in chiral quantum optics and nanophotonics where precise knowledge of field polarisation and specifically of the longitudinal components is paramount.