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How to confirm the focuses resulted by birefringent material at the same time?

  • November 12, 2025
  • 3 replies
  • 60 views

Yang.Yongtao
Fully Spectral
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Hi zemaxers

 I am learning about birefringent materials, and my question is

 How to confirm the focuses resulted by birefringent material at the same time? 

 

the image expected is below

Best regards

Yang

 

Best answer by MichaelH

Hi Yang,

Yes, you found the solution I was going to recommend.  Basically, using a Birefringent Surface is the same as using a multi-Config system and there are only a handful of analysis that support multi-config systems.  Any ray based analysis can simply be superimposed in a multi-config system to provide the output, but if you need a diffraction based multi-config analysis, the Huygens PSF with Config=All is one of the most powerful tools that OpticStudio has.  I would avoid any pupil-based calculations including FFT analysis because there is no “common” image-space reference point to superimpose the results onto a common plane.

3 replies

Yang.Yongtao
Fully Spectral
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  • Author
  • Fully Spectral
  • November 13, 2025

Sorry for bothering

 Huygens PSF can deal with this issue

 

 

 

 

 


MichaelH
Ansys Staff
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  • Ansys Staff
  • Answer
  • November 14, 2025

Hi Yang,

Yes, you found the solution I was going to recommend.  Basically, using a Birefringent Surface is the same as using a multi-Config system and there are only a handful of analysis that support multi-config systems.  Any ray based analysis can simply be superimposed in a multi-config system to provide the output, but if you need a diffraction based multi-config analysis, the Huygens PSF with Config=All is one of the most powerful tools that OpticStudio has.  I would avoid any pupil-based calculations including FFT analysis because there is no “common” image-space reference point to superimpose the results onto a common plane.


Yang.Yongtao
Fully Spectral
Forum|alt.badge.img
  • Author
  • Fully Spectral
  • November 17, 2025

Hi Yang,

Yes, you found the solution I was going to recommend.  Basically, using a Birefringent Surface is the same as using a multi-Config system and there are only a handful of analysis that support multi-config systems.  Any ray based analysis can simply be superimposed in a multi-config system to provide the output, but if you need a diffraction based multi-config analysis, the Huygens PSF with Config=All is one of the most powerful tools that OpticStudio has.  I would avoid any pupil-based calculations including FFT analysis because there is no “common” image-space reference point to superimpose the results onto a common plane.

 

Hi Michael

 Thanks !Actually, I am comparing the functions between CODEV and Zemax, and find that, in Code V it seems there only one method to calculate the PSF, possibly it is the Huygens PSF. it directly output a 2 points spread function result.

 

best regards

Yang