Hello,

I would like to model how much stress-induced birefringence we can tolerate in a slab of material. I am not really interested in the forces, but just the amout of anisotropy we can tolerate, i.e. the retardance induced for a given anisotropy. The slab’s length is fixed to 20 mm. The material can be anything but isotropic to start with. I need to do this in non-sequential to be able to implement it later on in a larger model.

I understand that we can specify the refractive index of the material as being anisotropic and define the uniaxial crystal orientation vector and the axis length. Can I use these parameters to specify the anisotropy? At least by playing around some numbers, it seems to work. The issue then is how I can correlate these parameters to the induced retardance (in waves, nm, radians, or whichever)?