From Ray Tracing to Unified Optical Modeling (Hauptvortrag)

The transformation of spherical waves is the most essential function of optical systems for imaging, collimation and focusing light. That is the reason for the potential of ray tracing for the modeling and design of such systems. Even for lighting systems ray tracing is often a useful tool as long as the modeled light fields are at least locally spherical fields in a good approximation and the interaction with optical components does not disturb this characteristic. As soon as we deal with more general light fields and components, ray tracing is often not accurate enough. Other modeling techniques must be added ranging from approximate to rigorous physical optics methods. In the talk we discuss the limitations of ray tracing and how to overcome them in system modeling. Ray tracing is considered as a subset of a much more general modeling theory, which is called Unified Optical Modeling (UOM). Some of the basic concepts of the theory are discussed. That includes the representation of light and systems in UOM, the propagation of light and the modeling of light sources. The software VirtualLab(TM) is based on UOM and is used to present application scenarios to illustrate the theory.