The present paper describes the finite difference time domain (FDTD) analysis of the light-beam diffraction from two- and three-dimensional (2-D and 3-D) magneto-optical (MO) disk structures. First, we show that the proposed new FDTD formulation is valid for MO disk medium and can avoid the divergence of fields encountered during the conventional FDTD calculations. Second, as the application of the present method to more complicated models, the main- and cross-polarized diffracted fields are numerically calculated for 2-D and 3-D four-layered MO disk models. The phase differences between two kinds of polarized components are shown. The results obtained here indicate that the proposed FDTD formulation can be applied to more complicated MO disk structures.

Making up a microwave simulator is tried, which has an analysis method based on the finite-element method as a solver and commercial tools as a pre- and post-processor of a graphical user interface. The platform of this simulator is Windows, but, since the codes and configuration files to be created are common on Windows, Unix, and Linux, the simulator running on any platform may be made up at the same time, except a document on which all the commands of the simulator are embedded and executable. Using the simulator, the transmission properties of a 2- and 3-D waveguide discontinuity in a microwave circuit and eigenmodes of a 2- and 3-D waveguide are analyzed, and the computed results are presented in graphs of S parameters and plots of the electric field distribution.