People & Pointers

Use this space to show off your skills, introduce yourself, or to chat about the latest in the world of optics.

166 Topics
694 Replies

OpticsTalk: Coordinate Breaks - Usage & Applications

Coordinate Breaks are a powerful tool to model off-axis and other non-rotationally symmetric systems. However, specifying parameters like arbitrary pivot points in 3D space is non-trivial in a sequential-based coordinate system. In this OpticsTalk, we'll take a closer look at setting up Coordinate Break surfaces and utilizing functions like the Coordinate Return and different Solve types to more efficiently set up complex systems. This talk is hosted by Angel Morales, an optical engineer from Zemax's US Customer Success Team.

2 years ago

Michael ChengZemax Staff

posted in People & Pointers

FAQ about Relative Illumination

Here we will introduce some FAQs about Relative Illumination in 4 topcis:* How is Relative Illumination calculated* Considering Fresnel loss* Situations that Relative Illumination cannot calculate* Relative Illumination in systems with FOV > 90 degrees* Cosine fourth Law It's suggested to see also this forum post:

1 year ago

Michael ChengZemax Staff

posted in People & Pointers

[Webinar] AR waveguide design and optimization based on dynamic linking between Zemax OpticStudio and Lumerical RCWA [Q&A]

This thread is dedicated to the upcoming webinar: AR waveguide design and optimization based on dynamic linking between Zemax OpticStudio and Lumerical RCWA. Any questions received during the webinar will be responded to as a reply on this thread. Feel free to post your own questions! The speaker will be notified and will respond as long as the thread is still open.Be sure to subscribe to this thread if you want to see additional discussion regarding this webinar topic. The thread will be open to new replies through Friday, July 29th. [The webinar has concluded] Webinar detailsDate: Thursday, July 21stTime: 6:00 - 6:45 AM PT | 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM PTPresenters:Michael Cheng, Lead Application Engineer at Ansys Zemax Kyle Johnson, Application Engineer II at AnsysAbstract:The market of augmented reality (AR) device has been growing and continue to speed up the process in these years. Among many different types of design, the diffractive waveguide type becomes one of the most important main

6 months ago

Alissa WilczynskiZemax Staff

posted in People & Pointers

Efficiency Tips & Tricks for OpticStudio

Share your tips & tricks for efficiently using OpticStudio with the community!  There are lots of little ways that we adapt our use of OpticStudio to streamline our work. These are usually learned over time, from colleagues, or from technical support, but they aren't typically found in other product education resources. You might have a favorite keyboard shortcut, saved settings for a particular analysis, a macro that automates 3 steps in your process tied to a hotkey, or a million other ideas. Help your fellow OpticStudio users and learn some new tricks yourself.

1 year ago

Csilla Timar-FulepEn-Lightened

posted in People & Pointers

How the polychromatic RMS wavefront error is calculated?

The polychromatic RMS wavefront error is calculated based on the following equation: RMS polychromatic = sqrt(sum ((optical path difference for each ray of the pupil for each wavelength)^2 x weight of the ray)/ sum(weight of the ray)). This means that the polychromatic RMS wavefront error is calculated for all wavelengths at the same time and for all the pupil. For polychromatic results, the reference is the primary wavelength, so the wavefront error is calculated for each wavelength at the same time but with the reference set to the primary wavelength for each wavelength used. This means that for each wavelength, the rays are first propagated until the image plane, then the optical path length of each ray is recorded, then the rays are propagated back to the reference sphere defined by the chief ray at the primary wavelength, then path length of each ray is recorded again during this back-propagation, and finally the back-propagation path length is subtracted from&nb

1 year ago

SahilZemax Staff

posted in People & Pointers

Calculate the Ray Transfer (ABCD) Matrix for thick Lens using ZOS-API (Python and MATLAB Interactive Extension).

To compute the ABCD matrix, OpticStudio traces rays over a very small region centered upon the reference field position. Usually, this is the center of the field of view. OpticStudio allows selection of which field position to use for reference.By default, OpticStudio sets the corner of the field grid in object space to be at the maximum radial field distance. Because object height is linear with the tangent of the field angle, the full width of the field when angles are used to define the field is given byWhere θr is the maximum radial field angle at the corner of the field.The ray coordinates in image space for the very small field of view are used to determine the ABCD matrix components. The use of an ABCD matrix allows for coordinate rotations. If the image surface is rotated, such that a y object coordinate images to both an x and a y image coordinate, the ABCD matrix will automatically account for the rotation. The grid distortion plot shows the linear grid, and then marks the ac

1 year ago

Michael ChengZemax Staff

posted in People & Pointers

About importing and simulating a phase profile of a DOE lens

Sometimes we might have some phase profile from a DOE lens or metalens and want to simulate it in OpticStudio. In this case, we can simply use the sequential surface 'Grid Phase' to import and simulate the data. However, care should actually be taken in this case. In short, if the phase profile comes from FDTD, BPM, or similar calculation, the data should only be used with POP but not ray-tracing. Otherwise the calculated result can be incorrect. Note here we are mainly focusing on importing a phase profile for DOE lens or metalens.   To understand more details, we can first look at the following two slides to understand how the diffraction ray-tracing is calculated. The first slide shows how a ray is diffracted by a grating. It's important to know ray-tracing through a DOE or grating is calculated based on the 'frequency' or 'period', but not anything about the real structure. In the second slide, it further explains that the phase profile under this meth

1 year ago

Alissa WilczynskiZemax Staff

posted in People & Pointers

[Webinar] Zemax and Lumerical: Part 2 - From Nano-scale to Macro-scale Optics and Back [Q&A]

This thread will be used to collect questions before the webinar, and to answer any questions we received during the webinar. Feel free to post your questions! Be sure to subscribe to this thread if you want to see additional discussion regarding this topic. The thread will be open to comments through Friday, May 27th. [The event has concluded] Date: Thursday, May 19thTime: 6:00am PST & 11:00am PSTPresenters:Shin-Sung Kim, Manager Application Engineering Csilla Timar-Fulep, Senior Application EngineerAbstract: In this webinar, we will examine how the portfolio of Ansys Optics tools offers a complete workflow for the design of metasurfaces, or metalenses. These revolutionary ultra-thin optical components can be used to manipulate light in the visible and IR range for many applications, including smartphone cameras, AR/MR displays, 3D sensing and face recognition. Because of the sub-wavelength nature of metasurfaces, it is critical to use a combination of electromagnetic field solver

8 months ago

PaulCInfrared

posted in People & Pointers

[Webinar] Using Skew Rays to Model Laser Beams [Q&A]

This thread is dedicated to the upcoming webinar: Using Skew Rays to Model Laser Beams. Any questions received during the webinar will be responded to as a reply on this thread. Feel free to post your own questions! The speaker will be notified and will respond as long as the thread is still open.Be sure to subscribe to this thread if you want to see additional discussion regarding this webinar topic. The thread will be open to new replies until Friday, April 22nd. Webinar detailsRegister here: [The webinar has concluded.]Date: Thursday, April 14th. Time: 6:00 - 6:35 AM PDT, and 11:00 - 11:35 AM PDTPresenter: Paul Colbourne, Senior Optical Designer at LumentumAbstract:In this webinar, Lumentum’s Paul Colbourne will describe how to use skew rays to model Gaussian beam propagation in OpticStudio. Skew rays are an efficient and accurate representation of Gaussian beams and can be used to quickly optimize for best focus or to minimize aberrations. Paul will demonstrate how to set up User-

9 months ago

Hui ChenZemax Staff

posted in People & Pointers

OS tips & discussion – Operand to report spot size in X or Y direction separately

In OpticStudio Sequential mode, one can use the Spot Diagram to view the RMS spot radius. And you can use operand such as RSCE, RSCH, RSRE, and RSRH to report this radial RMS spot size into the Merit Function Editor for optimization. However, if your system provides a non-circular spot, you might want to know the spot size along the X or Y direction separately and might want to optimize the X or Y spot size individually. When you go to the Text tab of the Spot Diagram window, you can view the RMS spot size in X or Y direction, but the RSCE/RSRE operands only report the radial spot size and cannot report the size along the X or Y direction separately.One thing you can do is to create a ZPL macro to pull data from the Spot Diagram Text tab and then use the ZPLM operand to return these X/Y spot size into the Merit Function Editor for optimization. However, this takes some programming effort and also having the ZPLM operand in the MFE might slow down the optimization process.Another approa

1 year ago

Csilla Timar-FulepEn-Lightened

posted in People & Pointers

How to model a birefringent polarization rotator?

In order to properly model the polarization rotation of an object made of birefringent material, we have to set up the ray trace mode of the object in the Non-Sequential Component Editor under Object Properties > Index > Birefringent type > Mode: The Mode control allows selection of which rays are actually traced. The distribution of energy does not change with this setting, and energy assigned to rays that are not traced are placed in the “lost energy (thresholds)” sum. Either ordinary or extraordinary rays, or both, may be traced. Waveplate Mode traces the energy along the path of the ordinary ray, however, the extraordinary electric field is also propagated with the ray, and the total electric field will be phase rotated by the differential index in the ordinary and extraordinary directions. Waveplate mode has to be used to model the polarization rotation of the object. In the attached example file, an extended source (Source Rectangle) launches rays parallel to th

6 months ago

Michael ChengZemax Staff

posted in People & Pointers

FAQ of Optically Fabricated Hologram (OFH): how to parameters Holo type and Diffract order

Here is a quick note about two frequently asked questions.How to set up the parameter Holo type and Diffract order for the surface Optically Fabricated Hologram (OFH) How to set up a reflection hologram using OFHBefore read this post, make sure you have read the following KBA. That is the background knowledge to this post:How to model holograms in OpticStudio Difference between OFH and other hologram typeFor other hologram models, we only assume the construction systems are composed by two converging or diverging source. (A collimated source is considered as case the converge/diverge point is at far point.) However, in real world, they are built with same laser with some lenses. And there the source is actually not a point but has some aberrations. Sometimes these aberrations are intentionally introduced to correct the aberrations that come in playback systems. The parameter 'Holo type'For OFH, the rule for Holo type is a little different compared to other hologram models. Normally,

5 months ago

Alissa WilczynskiZemax Staff

posted in People & Pointers

[Webinar] Zemax and Lumerical: Part 1 - From Nano-scale to Macro-scale Optics and Back

This thread will be used to collect questions before the webinar, and to answer any questions we received during the webinar. Feel free to post your questions! Be sure to subscribe to this thread if you want to see additional discussion regarding this topic. The thread will be open to comments until Thursday, May12th. Webinar details:[The webinar has concluded]Date: Thursday, May 5thTime: 6:00am PST & 11:00am PSTPresenters:Hui Chen, Senior Application Engineer Taylor Robertson, Senior Application EngineerAbstract: Complex optical systems require coupling simulation techniques across multiple length scales for accurate design and tolerancing. Extracting the light from nanoscale emissive structures in illumination systems, or propagating light through a mixture of guided and free space components are just a few examples.Ray tracing approximations break down near the dimension of the wavelength, and electromagnetic approaches are too expensive for larger devices. Traditional methods

8 months ago

Nicholas HerringerZemax Staff

posted in People & Pointers

David.VegaZemax Staff

posted in People & Pointers

Are you choosing a physical stop?

An interesting problem has surfaced as the Zemax team at Ansys continues to develop toolsets to aid the simulation of small form-factor, wide-angle systems such as cellphone camera lenses. Different ways exist to set up and model a stop with a lens traversing its aperture, but which is the best way? With this post, we share our recommendations and seek your feedback based on your experiences tackling this challenge.Virtual propagation modeling is one of the ways to model these stops. Technically, the portion of the lens that goes through the stop will modify the wavefront before the stop limits the wavefront with its clear aperture. Therefore, we cannot use virtual propagation to model these stops because we will be adding non-real pupil aberrations to our optical systems since we are forcing the entrance pupil to be flat when it is not.Here is an example of a stop with a lens going through it.By definition, “the aperture stop is the aperture in the system that limits the bundle of lig

5 months ago

Csilla Timar-FulepEn-Lightened

posted in People & Pointers

[Webinar] Simulating Infrared thermal detectors in OpticStudio [Q&A]Webinar

I will be hosting a webinar on modelling Infrared thermal detectors in OpticStudio. The details of the webinar are below! This thread will be used to collect questions before the webinar, and to answer any questions we received during the webinar. Feel free to post your questions! Be sure to subscribe to this thread if you want to see additional discussion regarding this topic. The thread will be open to comments until Thursday, January 27th. Webinar details:Register here: [Event has concluded, registration is no longer available]Date: Thursday, January 20thTime: 6:00am PST & 11:00am PSTPresenter: @Csilla Timar-Fulep, Senior Application Engineer for Ansys Abstract: In this webinar we will demonstrate how to model infrared thermal detectors in OpticStudio. We will first discuss how to describe thermal radiation accurately by blackbody sources. Then, we will show how to simulate the temperature calibration process of thermal detectors via the ZOS-API to enable not only qualitative a

1 year ago

Michael ChengZemax Staff

posted in People & Pointers

FAQ of volume hologram model in OpticStudio

Update 2021-09-24This forum thread is answer some frequently asked questions about the volume hologram model in OpticStudio.In OpticStudio 21.1, we have implemented volume hologram model for these sequential surfaces: Hologram 1, Hologram 2, Toroidal Hologram, Optically Fabricated Hologram. This allows users to analyze the diffraction efficiency with give material information. More infomraiton can be found in Help file in OpticStudio 21.1 and this knowledge base article: Simulating diffraction efficiency of a volume holographic grating using Kogelnik’s method 1. Can I make the hologram with any kind of user defined shape?When we say surface shape, it could be the substrate or the aperture. Here we will talk about both.The shape of substrate only supports Standard (conic sphere), Toroidal (cylinder), Extended Polynomial (freeform) for now, but we can investigate if users request more.If more shape of substrate are needed, except sending a feature request to Zemax product team, the fast

5 days ago

Sandrine AuriolZemax Staff

posted in People & Pointers

[Webinar] Cell Phone Lens: The Fundamentals Behind the Optical System Design [Q&A]

This thread is dedicated to the webinar: Cell Phone Lens: The Fundamentals Behind the Optical System Design. Any questions received during the webinar will be responded to as a reply on this thread. Feel free to post your own questions! The speaker will be notified and will respond as long as the thread is still open.Be sure to subscribe to this thread if you want to see additional discussion regarding this webinar topic. The thread will be open to new replies for a limited time following the event. This event has closed. Click here to watch the recording. Presenter: Katsumoto Ikeda, Manager Application EngineeringAbstract:The methods and tools for optical lens design have been evolving for over a hundred years, and today we have modern computing software to assist our lens design process. In particular, the degrees of freedom that plastic lenses provide, coupled with the computational power of today's computers with software have made the optical lens design of plastic optics more adv

5 months ago

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People & Pointers

166 Topics

OpticsTalk: Coordinate Breaks - Usage & Applications

FAQ about Relative Illumination

[Webinar] AR waveguide design and optimization based on dynamic linking between Zemax OpticStudio and Lumerical RCWA [Q&A]

Efficiency Tips & Tricks for OpticStudio

How the polychromatic RMS wavefront error is calculated?

Calculate the Ray Transfer (ABCD) Matrix for thick Lens using ZOS-API (Python and MATLAB Interactive Extension).

About importing and simulating a phase profile of a DOE lens

[Webinar] Zemax and Lumerical: Part 2 - From Nano-scale to Macro-scale Optics and Back [Q&A]

[Webinar] Using Skew Rays to Model Laser Beams [Q&A]

OS tips & discussion – Operand to report spot size in X or Y direction separately

How to model a birefringent polarization rotator?

FAQ of Optically Fabricated Hologram (OFH): how to parameters Holo type and Diffract order

[Webinar] Zemax and Lumerical: Part 1 - From Nano-scale to Macro-scale Optics and Back

OpticsTalk: Advanced ZPL macro programming

Why is the spot orientation different between POP and Spot Diagram

[Webinar] From Concept to CubeSat [Q&A]

Straylight in VR Pancake

Building Exit Pupil Expansion (EPE) based volume holographic gratings (VHG)

Cours IOGS-Zemax-Sep 2021 Éclairage en mode non-séquentiel avec OpticStudio

Tech Tip Tuesday: Working with freeform HUD elements

How is M2 (M squared) calculated in Physical Optics Propagation (POPD)?

Are you choosing a physical stop?

[Webinar] Simulating Infrared thermal detectors in OpticStudio [Q&A]Webinar

FAQ of volume hologram model in OpticStudio

[Webinar] Cell Phone Lens: The Fundamentals Behind the Optical System Design [Q&A]

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