When designing an optical system, it’s often important to consider energy efficiency. There are many factors in the design that can cause energy loss, including rays being vignetted due to obscuration or aperture clipping, lens material bulk absorption, and Fresnel reflection loss at interfaces. To include Fresnel reflection loss in energy efficiency calculation, you need to check the “Use Polarization” box under the analysis settings, because Fresnel reflection calculation depends on wavelength, ray angle of incidence, and its polarization state. Not all analyses in OpticStudio consider polarization. If you see the “Use Polarization” box being checked under the Settings dropdown for an analysis, it usually means the polarization ray trace is used to determine the transmitted intensity of the ray while accounting for Fresnel reflection and bulk absorption effects. The rays are attenuated in intensity and a weighted computation is performed when “Use Polarization” is checked.

If you are interested in knowing more about how to report energy efficiency using OpticStudio, we have a forum post describing all available tools at Report energy throughput in OpticStudio | Zemax Community