Approximate solution to the scalar wave equation for optical waveguides

We consider an approximate solution to the wave equation appropriate to the optical waveguides encountered in practice. The refractive-index profile may be arbitrary, and the geometry may be two or three dimensional. A circular or a planar waveguide could thus be treated by this method. The technique is more accurate and more useful than the WKB method, which is often used in problems of this type, because the technique is valid even at the turning points, where the WKB solution fails. The fields and the propagation constants of the lowest-order modes for two profiles are calculated, and they compare well with the exact solutions. The solutions that we proposed are, in fact, not new. However, insofar as we know, they are unknown and unused by the optics community.