Anomalous dispersion relations by symmetry breaking in axially uniform waveguides.

We show that modes of axially uniform waveguides of arbitrary cross section can be made to have anomalous dispersion relations resulting from strong repulsion between two modes. When the axial wave vector k is 0, the two modes have different TE/TM symmetry and thus can be brought arbitrarily close to an accidental frequency degeneracy. For nonzero k, the symmetry is broken causing the modes to repel. When the modes are sufficiently close together this repulsion leads to unusual features such as extremely flattened dispersion relations, backward waves, zero group velocity for nonzero k, atypical divergence of the density of states, and nonzero group velocity at k=0.